Justice, Primitive and Modern by Bob Black

From A Beautiful Resistance by Ian Blumberg-Enge

Review by Ian Blumberg Enge

“The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.”

-William Blake

“There are words that fit in the mouth only after all the teeth have been broken out.” This is how the legendary Ed Lawrence opens his preface to Bob Black’s essay collection The Abolition of Work, it’s the perfect poetic summation of Bob’s approach to his intellectual enemies, and this latest offering is no different.

For Bob, writing is play, “productive play” to use his amazing phrase, but he puts in the work. He went to law school and, for the most part, made his living doing legal research. This clearly had an impact on Bob’s perfectly constructed arguments, but it also gave him a unique insight into an area many anarchists know little about, and almost avoid as if fearing some supernatural contagion – law and criminal justice.

Bob’s Defacing the Currency contains some great articles on crime and jury nullification. His book Friendly Fire contains a 33-page transcript of a deposition he sat for during a legal dispute with an employer. Bob spends most of the 33 pages arguing with the attorney about whether he can legally set his briefcase standing upright on the table, a must-read before your next interaction with any attorney.

Bob’s latest book, Justice, Primitive and Modern, put out in 2022 by Nine-Banded Books makes his fullest critique of western justice yet, not just its process but its very definition. As Bob points out in the intro, skeptics of anarchism rightly critique its lack of clear thought on dispute resolution. Bob is a realist, utopianism, he says, is always reactionary, and he knows that disputes of the kind we deal with every day in modern state capitalism will plague anarchist societies as well. The question is, how do anarchist values translate to this process?

Bob uses a close study of various non state cultures to contrast forms of dispute resolution that actually benefit the victims of crimes, and the communities they live in, with western justice, which often destroys communities and disregards victims in favor of what most benefits state hegemony. A form of justice that doesn’t exist to punish rule-breakers doesn’t have innocent victims, like people who did long stints for growing weed to get out and find it legalized, or people spending life in prison who were simply wrongly accused.

Bob’s next important point is that any form of real dispute resolution must be voluntary. For both parties to be happy, for the dispute to actually be resolved and the community healed, they both have to agree to be there. This gives us an interesting metric for community because disputes are usually only truly resolved when both parties have a complex web of social connections motivating them to be there. You can’t have justice for communities in a system enforced by state violence, whether that state is socialist or fascist or any other flavor, only anarchism offers such a possibility.

This book will make you rethink your definition of justice and make you realize how many of the people claiming to be your leftist comrades are just as law-and-order-bloodthirsty as any conservative given the right triggers. It will also validate your commitment to anarchism as the most humane system of social organization ever dreamed up. And as a plus, like the rest of Bob’s work, it is an extremely fun and funny read.

Ian Blumberg-Enge

Ian Blumberg-Enge is a model agnostic anarchist, writer, and utopian kook. His work is focused on the intersection of mysticism and anarchism. He is co-author, with Peter J. Carrol, of Interview with a Wizard, published by Mandrake of Oxford.