Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
A Conscious Choice column from August 2008, written as progressives lost faith in the Obama campaign. Pinchbeck sets out the policies he would want — an end to GDP as the measure of a society, a Northern European mix of incentive and social protection, an exit from the military pursuit of oil.
A Conscious Choice column from June 2008, written around New York’s commemorations of Gandhi’s satyagraha. Pinchbeck distinguishes active nonviolence from the passive ahimsa popular in yoga culture, and argues that the techniques Gandhi and King used are the ones now needed against the military and corporate order.
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 autumn 2007. Pinchbeck traces his own alienation from politics back to the Watergate hearings, then uses Hardt and Negri’s Multitude to argue that the crisis of political legitimacy conceals a real potential for constituent power, and that self-knowledge and social responsibility cannot be separated.
A survey of recent books written for Artforum in 2003. Pinchbeck sets Alain Joxe’s Empire of Disorder, Paul Virilio’s Crepuscular Dawn, and Andrew Kimbrell’s Fatal Harvest against Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, arguing that American consumption rests on manufactured false needs and that, per Hardt and Negri, cultural producers form a potentially revolutionary class.
On the intentional communities movement, centred on Twin Oaks — the commune in Louisa County, Virginia, founded in 1967 on the model of B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two. Written for The New York Times Magazine, August 1997.