Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
A short piece for Reality Sandwich from October 2008, written after several warnings of imminent socio-economic disruption, including John Petersen’s precognitive-dream study at the Arlington Institute. Pinchbeck sets out what such a rupture might involve and argues the cooperative model will ultimately displace the competitive one.
First published on Reality Sandwich on 18 March 2008 and reprinted in Fifth Estate later that year. Reading the Bear Stearns collapse and the subprime meltdown alongside Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse and David Harvey’s remarks at the Left Forum, Pinchbeck argues that this is not a liquidity crisis but a crisis of money itself, invoking Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts on money as the visible divinity.
A Conscious Choice column from July 2008. Pinchbeck recalls channelling a prophetic voice in the Brazilian Amazon and admits he now feels less like a prophet than like Chicken Little, then takes Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse seriously enough to ask what an American version of the Soviet unravelling would look like.
Written for Reality Sandwich in May 2008 to announce the Evolver Exchange marketplace. Pinchbeck confronts the obvious objection — why would a magazine about gift economies build a shop — with an argument about an anti-consumerist idealism that nonetheless keeps buying things, and about what a values-based commerce might look like.
A Conscious Choice column from February 2008, written as the subprime crash exposed deeper faults in banking and insurance. Pinchbeck argues that economic and social systems can be redesigned so that cooperative behaviour is rewarded over selfish action, and that the design revolution and the political struggle are the same struggle.
A long essay for Reality Sandwich from November 2007, written after a refresher course in Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Marcuse, Arendt and Bookchin. Pinchbeck settles on Hardt and Negri’s Multitude as the most satisfying account of the present, and asks whether an economic plunge would open awareness or drive a retraction into fundamentalism.
A Conscious Choice column from October 2007. Pinchbeck reads the subprime collapse as the visible edge of a longer dynamic — industry outsourced, a credit-based populace left with little to produce — and consults Ervin Laszlo’s chaos theory on whether the coming instability opens a decision window rather than simply closing one.