Daily Inspiration Quote by Bob Black

Bob Black’s line is a Molotov cocktail disguised as a definition: law isn’t justice, procedure, or even legitimacy. It’s coercion that managed to stick. The phrasing flips civics-class pieties into a blunt outcome test. If the state threatens you and it works, we retroactively dignify the threat with a capital-L concept. If it fails, we call it “overreach,” “abuse,” or “an unlawful order” - not because the intent was different, but because the grip slipped.

The specific intent is demystification. Black, writing out of anarchist and anti-work traditions, targets the comforting fiction that law is a neutral framework. He treats it as a technology: an “application” deployed by official actors. That tech framing matters. It makes law sound like software pushed to users, with “coercion” as the core function and “succeeds” as the only metric that counts. The joke is cold: legality becomes a post-hoc label slapped onto power’s wins.

The subtext is a sneer at liberal faith in reform. If law is just effective force, then pleading for better laws can look like negotiating the terms of your own management. It also implies that “rights” are not moral guarantees but temporary stalemates - privileges that persist only while coercion is constrained by counter-power: unions, communities, courts, disruption.

Contextually, it’s a quote that lands harder in moments when the state’s violence is obvious but selectively recognized: policing, prisons, border regimes. Black isn’t asking you to respect the law; he’s daring you to notice what you’ve been trained not to call by its name.