Bob Black’s first book in sixteen years.

This is not because Bob has stopped writing, or even that the audience for his work has disappeared. Quite the opposite. It’s been sixteen years since Anarchy After Leftism because it has taken that long for the anarchist space to catch up to him. This 350+ page collection of formerly and freshly published articles also includes a lengthy denouncement of Noam Chomsky as (not) anarchist intellectual, and engagements with democracy, technology,anarchism, and the law. Bob Black is an obsessed, intelligent, and hostile thinker whose writings are, if not the most, then among the most clear contemporary anarchist thinking. His passionate denunciations against the Left are a compelling call to arms. He names names, understands decades of political context, and has the desire to build a rational case for new and experienced readers. That he does it well, especially the naming of names, is why he is despised. Those who despise him confuse the man with the idea, but the idea is unassailable. On the one hand there is anarchism, a leftist, historical-above-all-else, ideology. On the other is anarchy, a life lived autonomously and cooperatively.

—from the introduction by Aragorn!

Publisher: LBC Books
Date: February 2013
348 pages, Digest
$12

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Applied Metaphysics

This is a critique of America and what remained of its resistance Occupy.

It comes to pass, at last: this great Leviathan that has swallowed the whole world, now commences its death agony. The mechanical man likened unto the perfected State, with unweeping eyes and unfeeling heart, rusts from its own internal emptiness. The clockwork society breaks down. And the returning ghost towns, like a forgotten malediction, return to gaze mournfully at the passing of the glory of the world. The suburbs, this great gilded prison, agonize as they are left to return to nature, to slowly decay in their false-seeming gentility. Like unto like, America “is the nothingness that reduces itself to nothingness”, in the words of Hegel. Such are the heart-rending times the Americans inhabit.

That America and its way of life are ending, there is not the slightest doubt. But for what reason,
and in what manner, and what can possibly come next? What happens in the gap between two worlds, when the new is only dimly glimpsed like a far shore in the night, and the old is disappearing so fast there seems to be no solid ground remaining? Questions of first things and of last things necessarily arise. This is the position of our generation. This is our position, along with our generation—at the very end of America, and the very beginning of something new. So we are as Ancients, we, fingering our threadbare fragments of memory collected from this dying civilization. Is it gone, then, this whole shape of a world? We welcome its passing. Is this the future rushing towards us? We must ready ourselves. We are the only ones who have really started, because we are the only ones who have started to think.

Publisher: LBC Books
Buy: December 2012
148 pages, Digest
$5

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