Anarch straightened his shoulders

Roman Korolev - about the book "Only anarchism" compiled by Bob Black

In Russian, the collection “Only anarchism” was published, compiled specifically for the Giley publishing house by Bob Black - a fighter against the institution of the state, as well as a gall publicist, a tricster and a souvenir. Of the several dozens of texts included in the book, the reader, according to the compiler, will be able to get an adequate idea of ​​the modern (from 1946 to this day) the theory of anarchism and its basic ideas. At the request of Gorky, Roman Korolev got acquainted with this publication and found out how well Black coped with the task set.

Bob Black (comp.). Only anarchism: anthology of anarchist texts after 1945. M.: Gileya, 2020. Translation from English and French V. Sadovsky, S. Mikhailenko and others. Under the general editorship of S. Kudryavtsev. Content

For some foreigners, Russian culture is a nesting doll, vodka and herring, for others - thieves in law and security forces, and for the third - suddenly anarchism. The line of radical resistance of power and oppression stretches with a steamed bicford cord through half of Russian history, from Old Believer Hares to the Tachanks of the Makhnovshchina. The Russian Empire was born the largest theoreticians of abundance, and then an experiment was put on the construction of a “without parasites” and commissars in Gulyipol, but for the reasons that did not require explanation, this tradition was actually completely interrupted for seventy years.

In 2020, the American publicist Bob Black decided to return the debt to Russian culture and made us specially anthology of the most important, from his point of view, of the post -war texts in the theory of anarchism. The collection was published by the Gileya publishing house, which previously published Black’s books “Anarchism and other obstacles to the anarchy” and “Anarchy and democracy”. After the publication in Russia, Black plans to adapt the book for the English -speaking reader and publish in his homeland.

Who is Bob Black and why doesn't he want to work?

Bob Black, who lives in Detroit, a 70-year-old anarchist with a legal education, became famous thanks to his, as it is now customary, an incredibly toxic manner of communication. Black began its activities to reorganize the Society in San Francisco in the second half of the 1970s, laying leaflets in the city signed by the phrase “The Last International”. These leaflets (which he, according to Mikhail Verbitsky, managed to come up with about 10,000 pieces) not only expressed anarchist ideals, but also rudely ridiculed the bird's tongue and mildly values ​​of modern Black of academic left.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Bob Black was mainly engaged in conflicting with many anarchist groups, left-wing intellectuals living on benefits, and editions of magazines that spread microscopic circulations by mail. In response, rumors of varying degrees of monstrousness were dissolved about him, rushed with fists, threatened with a gun and sent a bomb by mail. Black, which was quite atypical for the anarchist, was not shy to sue offenders to the court and, being a lawyer by profession, as well as a squabbler and a judge at the call of his soul, delayed them into a tranet of processes lasting years.

In addition to anarchism, Black was interested in various marginals and htonic game, which brought him closer to the author of the legendary anthology “Culture from the Apocalypse” Adam Parfrey, which published Black Beneath the Underground at his Feral House publishing house. The old-timers of Runet Bob Black will probably seem similar to the Misha Misha mathematician “to kill all people” Verbitsky , and between them in reality there is not only a karmic connection. Verbitsky was one of the first in Russia to publish the texts of Bob Black (on his website) and wrote a very successful preface to his book “Anarchism and other obstacles to the anarchy”.

Bob Black Kosterite Anarchist movement for the vast majority of its participants settled in a comfortable framework of the subculture and, in fact, do not even strive for society without a state. For the cult of authorities that reigning inside the movement (bright examples and targets for Black's constant attacks are a linguist Noah Khomski and ecologist Murray Kurmchin ). For the fact that instead of studying real self -government practices, anarchists prefer to compose unreadable academic texts. But most of all, he was hated by anarchists at the left movement of the cult of labor.

Not so long ago, “ delusional work ”, the sensational book of the American anthropologist (and also anarchist, which is characteristic), David Greber, who died suddenly last year, published in Russian . In it, Greber tries to explain why most people in the workplace are engaged in an unnecessary nonsense and why society will only benefit from the abolition of a huge number of meaningless positions. So, Bob Black has been worn with the same idea since the 1980s, except that it expresses it in a more journalistic language.

“Only a small, constantly decreasing part of the work serves some useful goal, something other than the protection and reproduction of the universal system with its political and law enforcement appendages. <...> Right, immediately, we can free tens of millions of sellers, soldiers, managers, cops, brokers, priests, lawyers, bankers, teachers, guards, apartment owners, advertising agents, as well as everyone who works for them, ”wrote Black in one of his program work, translated into thirteen languages ​​- in“ abolishing work ”.

Love for the term Potlach (the devastating custom of the North American Indians, during which they asked their neighbors with their property or destroyed it, not allowing excesses to accumulate) and the works of anthropologist Marshall Salinza (who discovered the Aboriginal Oceania, that hunters and gathers spend much less time than the so -called civilized people, but not at all They suffer from a lack of goods) Bob Black is related with anarcho-preimivists. This is a rather extravagant direction of modern political thought, the most prominent representative of which is American John Zerozan , postulates that the main evil in the history of mankind was the invention of agriculture and the progress that followed him, and our goal should be a return to a blissful state of primitiveness.

At the same time, Bob Black himself does not consider himself to be among them, but calls himself an “anti -anti -dimeivist”. This only means that he criticizes opponents of primitivism, as he considers them even more stupid than other anarchists.

Children's disease of levis in anarchism

The collection “Only anarchism” consists of 33 texts that are divided into 12 sections devoted to the views of anarchists to various problems of modernity or scientific disciplines - psychology, anthropology, philosophy, work, ecology and the need for organization. Black wrote a preface to each of these sections.

The set of authors is very motley: the book included academically successful intellectuals like the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolf , and the heavyweight of anarchist thought, to which the same grazan or a team of anonymous authors Crimethink , and publicists who are not known to anyone, except the compiler of the collection. Among other texts, one can find a calm study of the famous ethnologist Pierre Closch on the theme of the life of South American Indians, and critical essays about various aspects of modern civilization, and surreal fantasies that would look more appropriate on the pages of some punk magazine.

For the sake of Black, pluralism even placed in the “Organization” section the text of his sworn enemy Murray Buhmchin, providing him with a destructive preface dedicated to the author of the author. This text, entitled “Spontaneity and Organization”, where Kurdchin (with the obvious approval of Bob Black) smashes modern left for him for misunderstanding of counterculture, indifference to feminism, indifference to ecology and ignoring the workers themselves, makes a very funny impression if it was written when it was written. It may seem that Kurdchin wrote out his lamentations just recently, but in fact it has been not among the living for fourteen years, and the text was written in 1971, just after then half a century has changed in this regard.

Bob Black does not spend space on formulating the concept of anarchism or writing a brief introduction into it. In the end, for this there is already an ANARCHISM brochure from the Oxford series A Very Short Introduction, and its book is a collection of theoretical texts, the authors of which themselves attribute themselves to this tradition. “What is anarchy? Self -organizing society. Why be an anarchist? At least, the beginning of the answer to this question will be-why be someone else? ”

From the articles of the collection, you can find out who, according to the anarchists, will clean the sewer in society without a state. As a decision is possible in society, if direct democracy is too repressive due to the fact that the minority should obey the choice of the majority, and the consensus in a large society is unlikely to be achieved. Why people with a craving for violence and the lack of empathy strive for posts of politicians and police officers, and for what reason the anarchists should treat the idea of ​​working organizations with the same skepticism as the Marxist party.

Anthology is called “only anarchism”, and, apparently, one of the main tasks that its compiler sought to solve was a separation of this political course from the fact that it only impersonates the struggle against all power.

Anarchism is not a faint political thought, it must be separated from the struggle both for socialism and for liberal democracy. Those who deny labor and advocate self -organization, have nothing to do either under the red flags or with the electorate of a democratic party, dancing with joy at the sight of a replacement of the white president with a black. Both those and others betray the anarchists throughout the history of the movement, and Bob Black is tired of this endless narrative about defeats. Thus, the central in the collection can be considered the parts of “levity” and “democracy”, where, as it is easy to guess, the authors of the collection with these concepts are striking.

Similar demarcation must be carried out inside the movement itself. Who, for example, is more anarchist anarchists: syndicalists who have devoted themselves to the struggle for the rights of workers, or marketers, confident that if you remove the state and save corporations, the life of humanity will immediately go to the way? Yes, neither those nor the other are at all anarchists, Black answers, because instead of the fight against the repressive kingdom of labor, they want to perpetuate him.

Who is the most important anarchist here?

Unlike the two -volume collection “Anthology of modern anarchism and left -wing radicalism”, which was published in 2003 in the publishing house “Ultra. Culture”, edited by Alexei Tsvetkov, Gileevsky anthology does not claim wide versatility. Bob Black honestly warns in the introduction that impartiality is not about him: then there will be only those texts that he himself considers anarchist and which he personally read personally. The obvious oddities and disadvantages of the book “Only anarchism” inevitably follow from this approach.

It is difficult to imagine where the Russian-speaking reader could get invaluable information about a certain Chase Buft-“probably the most dull of the current anarcho-lavas”-or find out how some shameless professor called the “self-proclaimed anti-anarchist anarchist”. Entire pages are devoted to the information of accounts with Murrey Kurdchin, “pretended to an anarchist”, the debrown of his cult, exposing “his lackeys” and demonstrating the techniques of truly Stalin's polemic, which he had the courage to turn. The fact that not every reader will remember who Murray Kurmchin is, the author is clearly not very concerned.

In turn, what the reader does not recognize from this anthology is also due to the views and character of Bob Black. For example, the compiler of the book is extremely skeptical about technology, so you will not learn from it anything about cryptoanarchism , whose representatives have hopes for the role of cryptography and computer sciences in the fight against state oppression. The cipher -punch , new pirate utopias on the network and the use of high technologies for the construction of autonomous communes and the creation of parallel societies - all this remains overboard the interests of the compiler, confident that the mass reader is more likely to familiarize themselves with the discussions of primitives about the causes of the decline of primitive society.

Boba Black does not like mysticism, so from this book you will not learn anything that many authors from Alan Moore to Robert Anton Wilson Anarchist views on society are linked with esoteric practitioners and a gnostic desire to find genuine reality under the mask of the material world. It comes to the point of absurdity: Gary Beatnik Buddhist “Snyder is one of the two authors participating in this book (the second is John Clark), who professes something like religious faith,” writes Black and, after several pages, quotes his own friend Peter Lamborne Wilson, more known as Khakim-Bay -not only the creator of the theory of temporary autonomous zones, which was taken into the arsonist, which was taken into the arsons. Protesters in Seattle, but also an unorthodox Muslim , as well as a consistent propagandist of almost all possible sects and heresies (but Black considers it necessary to mention this side of his views).

The reader does not learn anything about insurrectionism, he is also a rebel anarchism, because Black "could not find a modern hobby for a clear wording for this." However, the fact that this hobby (insurrendists advocate for the violent resistance of the authorities) are enough fans, you can guess at least for the active participation of anarchists in the protests of the Black Lives Matter or regular clashes of desperate Greeks with police special forces in the Athenian region of exarchy. The Russian -speaking reader may impress this form of anarchism on the collection “ on knives with all existing ”, which, among other things, included the texts of Italian Alfred Bonanno, sentenced in 2004 to six years in prison for participating in an armed underground organization.

Against philosophy as such, Black seems to have nothing, but in the collection it is represented only by an article by Robert Paul Wolf about the Kantian roots of anarchist ethics. Wolf is far from the only academic philosopher-anarchist: at least the British Kricli British , who explores the problem of disappointment, Nihilism and the poetry of David Bowie, or the Sol of Newman , who explained in the book “ From Bakunin to Lacan ”, as the invariability and postmodern philosophy, can recall. A great example of a philosophical study written in Russian and from anarchist positions - Maria Rakhmaninova, published last year, published last year .

The vigilant reader will also find that gender problems are completely ignored in anthology. It happened no coincidence, because Bob Black is known for his sharp rejection of feminism and the use of Feminaci neologism he invented.

We repeat: to blame Bob Black in voluntarism, even with all the desire, it will not work, since from the very beginning he announced his maximum addiction. But we can only draw the reader's attention to the fact that there are a lot of ideas, authors, thoughts and texts outside the book, among which, perhaps, there is something more interesting for you personally. After all, ultimately, every anarchist in heart is sure that no one except him understands what he is - a real anarchism.