Bob Black
Robert Charles "Bob" Black, Jr. (born January 4, 1951) is an American anarchist. He is the author of the books The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, Defacing the Currency, and numerous political essays.
Biography
Black graduated from the University of Michigan and Georgetown Law School. He later took M.A. degrees in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California (Berkeley), criminal justice from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, and an LL.M in criminal law from the SUNY Buffalo School of Law. During his college days (1969-1973) he became disillusioned with the New Left of the 1970s and undertook extensive readings in anarchism, utopian socialism, council communism, and other left tendencies critical of both Marxism–Leninism and social democracy. He found some of these sources at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, a major collection of radical, labor, socialist, and anarchist materials which is now the repository for Black's papers and correspondence. He was soon drawn to Situationist thought, egoist communism, and the anti-authoritarian analyses of John Zerzan and the Detroit magazine Fifth Estate. He produced a series of ironic political posters signed "The Last International", first in Ann Arbor, Michigan, then in San Francisco where he moved in 1978. In the Bay Area he became involved with the publishing and cultural underground, writing reviews and critiques of what he called the "marginals milieu." Since 1988 he has lived in upstate New York.