Paul Ginsborg, The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives, Yale University Press, 214 pages


Paul Ginsborg, a leading historian of modern Italy, here takes as his subject a global theme – the unsustainable quality of modern life and the scope for changing it. His acerbic profile of Silvio Berlusconi became a best-seller in Italy. In this book he explains how his own participation in a Florentine social movement led him to explore both the state of the world and what might be done about it. While there are some well-chosen Italian examples, the experience of many countries is drawn upon.

This is not a book about rival economic or social policies or the technical instruments that might advance them. It starts and finishes with an exploration of the way in which the habits and practices of everyday life help to create, or express, the wider order in which we live. The first of five chapters explains why ‘we can’t go on living like this’. Heedless consumerism is destroying the human habitat and has accumulated poverty and wealth on a vast scale. Poverty is concentrated in proliferating slums marked by urbanisation without development. Seventy per cent of the poorest – the 1.3 billion living on a dollar a day or less – are women. While the overall position of women may have improved a bit, the repression of female potential is still staggering. Female exclusion also aggravates the violence of a world still policed by bombing and firepower.

Ginsborg’s delivers an indictment all the more effective for its refusal of hyperbole and its insistence on a careful weighing of evidence. Thus, he cites studies that suggest that energy resources remain quite abundant, despite escalating demand; the problem is rather the ability of the ‘natural sinks’ - the atmosphere and the oceans - to absorb the resulting greenhouse gasses. Despite growing fuel efficiency world emissions of carbon dioxide have quadrupled in the last fifty years.

Ginsborg points out that between the last decade of the 19th century and the last decade of the 20th, world output increased 14 times, industrial output 40 times, energy use 13 times and the world fish catch 35 times. While governments make a contribution to these numbers individual consumption choices are the decisive factor. These choices are made in the context of a commercial culture that is by turns clamorous and insidious.

Growth might be welcome if it was accompanied by greater equality and if the metrics we use to measure it properly registered the destructive effects of ‘externalities’, namely the using up of scarce resources and the poisoning of the planet. While true growth is welcome the sort of growth represented by the Nile Perch industry in Tanzania, from the standpoint of the local people, destroys more wealth than it creates. While fifty tons of frozen perch fillets are flown to Europe each day the introduction of a voracious predator has nearly destroyed the fish that used to help feed a population of a million around Lake Victoria, creating the horrendous spectacle revealed in Hubert Souper’s extraordinary film, Darwin’s Nightmare. International statistics capture the rise in fish exports and not the decline in what is locally caught and consumed. Despite their pitiful resources Africans become hooked on Western consumer goodies, with Mercedes for the elite to soft drinks and chemical highs for the slum dwellers. Africa lacks the capital, productivity of labour and stability that might allow genuine growth. Foreign corporations give them selective access to the former but in a loop which feeds the profits to the metropolis and the untallied costs to local communities.

Huge inequalities reinforce these patterns. Africans don’t have purchasing power, Europeans do. Ginsborg points out that in 2000, the richest 5 per cent of the world’s population enjoyed an income 114 times as large as the poorest five per cent. Also: ‘The income of the richest 25 million Americans was the equivalent of that of almost 2 billion of the world’s poor.’ (The income of the richest 25 million Europeans would be only a little less than that of their American cousins). Ginsborg points out that the United States spends only 0.1 per cent of its GDP on overseas aid and Britain only a little more, while several Scandinavian countries spend 1 per cent of GDP on such aid. (One could add that whereas US aid often props up dictators like Mubarak, Scandinavian aid is more deserving of the name).

Global poverty hurts the advanced world too. The low wages of China’s workers weakens demand in the global economy, just as poor production standards in the special export zones damage a wider ecology. Moreover, as Hurricane Katrina and the Paris riots show, poverty and exclusion fester in the global metropolis too..

Ginsborg is prepared to cite some of the big figures on global problems but his real concern is with the micro-processes that reproduce inequality and destroy sustainability. The first world citizen who wakes in the morning, takes a shower and has breakfast, will already have laid claim to a disproportionate share of scarce resources, and confirmed global relations of dependence. Even such an apparently innocuous convenience as a refrigerator can either menace the ozone layer or, by breaking down every five years, squander scarce resources and energy.

Yet the difficulty is that ‘convincing alternatives are not in abundant supply’. So, Gisborg explains, his book ‘argues for the need to “re-appropriate”, to take back under our own control, the sorts of lives we live and the contexts in which we live them.’ The context is consumer capitalism, itself the expression of financial power and the implacable pursuit of accumulation. He cites Ad Age, journal of the US advertising profession, to the effect that auto manufacturers spent $19 billion in 2002 promoting their wares to US consumers, while the federal government spent only $7 billion on improving public transportation systems. And he gives us a vertinigious glimpse of the competitive and speculative pressures which drive the cycle of overconsumption, and of the media empires which foster and defend it.

Ginsborg is pessimistic about challenging or replacing capitalism. Instead he envisions social movements which can foster a culture of educated consumption, animated by ethical restraints. He also wishes to deepen democratic practice so that voting publics become more intimately acquainted with the consequences of their choices. He is encouraged by the example of the ‘Fair Trade’ movement which has established a connection between first world consumers and third world producers. Ginsborg is not a hair-shirt radical, preaching abstinence, so he is happy to endorse Italy’s sensuous ‘slow food’ movement – he might have added ‘thrift shop’ chic as a kindred expression of discriminating consumerism. Ginsborg approves moves to apply ‘ethical screens’ to investment funds while cautioning that pursuit of the bottom line while be difficult to subdue.

Two extended chapters explore ways in which families and ‘civil society’ might establish a ‘molecular change’ in society that could begin to establish a counter-dynamic to consumer capitalism. His concluding chapter on ‘Making Democracy Work’ culminates in an evocation of the now-famous popular budgeting process in the Brazilian municipality of Porto Alegre.

While Ginsborg is committed to ‘the powerful cumulative effects of individual actions, taken freely on a daily basis’ he is also aware that most of his chosen counter-measures are no more than, as he very accurately puts it, ‘drops in the ocean’. His discussion of families does not shrink from the fact that the family in the privileged site of over-consumption. Likewise the institutions of civil society can promote exclusion and patriarchy as well as undermine them. The growth of ‘Fair Trade’ still leaves it a miniscule part of the grocery business, and one sometimes deployed by the retail chains to enhance their image.

Overall there is a yawning mis-match between the scale of the problems Ginsborg identifies and that of the antidotes he can recommend. He often candidly registers the gap while refusing to be dismayed by it: For example he writes, ‘initiatives on the level of foreign aid and debt cancellation touch only marginally the structural economic relations between North and South as they have developed historically. Yet they are immensely valuable. They give the idea of targets to which governments can aspire, and by which they will be judged.’ The first statement is true, the second a great exaggeration and the third optimistic. Of course the debts should be cancelled but by itself this will not remove the coercive conditions of underdevelopment.

No longer believing in the replacement of capitalism, Ginsburg writes: ‘What might be suggested instead is a critical traversing of the sheer faces of the capitalist system, with the intent of introducing counter-dynamics to those now operating.’ This image is used more than once yet remains insufficiently elaborated or explained. While capitalism has many powerfully systematic features, the notion of its ‘sheer faces’ is too monolithic in conception. Ginsborg writes as some sort of post-Marxist but at least the classical Marxists, including Gramsci (about whom he writes with great respect) believed in getting up close to the capitalist system in order to chart its dynamic tendencies and contradictions. Today’s globalised and financialised capitalism has several ‘sheer faces’ and also many fissures, gullies and ravines, precariously balanced boulders, and melting glaciers. The world of investment banks and hedge funds, institutional investors and pension funds, transnational corporations and ratings agencies, tax havens and national regulators, is rugged and uneven. Notwithstanding free market dogma the state still plays a huge role, offering lavish subsidies and guaranteeing contracts.

Over the last two years a London art group, Lottie Child’s ‘Climbing Club’, has conducted regular week-end climbing expeditions to the City, in which they scale its financial fortresses making use of adjacent guild halls, benevolent society HQs, churches, lamp-posts and regulator’s offices. Their aim is both to dramatise different types of risk and to overcome the constraints of an imposing built environment. Each climb is documented by photographs and recordings, the latter enlisting financial experts at ground level who explain the nature of the terrain and risks to be navigated. The City, with its crowded jumble of buildings, has offered hospitable territory for these expeditions, as Wall Street might also. But the isolated towers of Canary Wharf really do comprise ‘sheer faces’ of capitalism offering no purchase to hand, rope or spike. Those who commission these utopian structures may wish to feel free of messy entanglements with the human herd down below but their favoured financial instruments mean that their fortunes are built on an uncertain foundation of junk bonds, collateralised debt obligations, discounted oil prices, fragile futures’ brokers, and the default rates of sub-prime lenders.

Ginsborg does not supply an account of how contemporary capitalism works, no doubt on the grounds that it is too far removed from everyday life. Yet this was not a necessary exclusion. Many of those who pioneered the study of everyday life – Henri Lefebvre for example – understood it as constructed through the contradictory dynamics of the capitalism and class struggle. Likewise those who coined the term ‘civil society’ saw it as embracing the forms of economic life. Ginsborg is so disabused of the traditional models of leftwing politics that trade unions go unmentioned and new dimensions of class struggle unexplored. Perhaps trade unions as we have known them are indeed passé, but the conquests of their heyday are still with us, in the shape of pension and healthcare systems, some of which wield considerable financial power.

There is nothing in this book about pensioner movements, or intergenerational campaigns to defend pension rights, or the social activism of some large public sector pension funds, even though all of these have been making news, and sometimes unmaking governments, for years now. Ginsborg’s blind-spot concerning generational solidarity - shared, it must be said, by many critics of globalisation - also means that he fails to consider the vast consequences of fertility decline, a phenomenon of ‘every day life’ with its own interesting politics. The one child family eases demographic pressure but also sets a challenging agenda, not only for Italy and France but for Japan and China too.

While urging new approaches to democracy, Ginsborg has little to say about democracy in economic life. Given the amount of time spent in the workplace this would surely be a promising arena for the ‘participatory democracy’ that he favours. He does roundly declare that the ‘almost complete absence of any employees voices in the strategic decision-making process of transnational companies is a striking indictment of modern capitalism.’ But this is the end of a brief discussion, not the starting point for an investigation into how the situation might be changed.

Likewise Ginsborg is well aware that many of the autonomous institutions of civil society lack a command of significant economic resources but says almost nothing about how ways might be found to endow them properly. Ginsborg does not aspire to be a policy wonk but this is, above all, a work of advocacy. I can understand why he declines to rehash familiar half-baked proposals for redistributing income and regulating corporations. But without some well-baked way of redistributing capital and recomposing the board-rooms, grotesque inequality and irresponsibility will persist, and civil society remain prostrate before big business.

Ginsborg does cite the bold proposal for establishing social funds made by Rudolf Meidner, the co-architect, with Gosta Rehn, of Sweden’s postwar welfare state. It is, however, a little misleading to cite this as an example of a failure of a move to ‘workplace democracy’. Though there was a dimension of workplace democracy in Meidner’s scheme this was secondary to its principal purpose which was to re-distribute capital and to establish a new decentralised and egalitarian model of collective ownership and social self-management. Each year every large corporation was to be required to issue shares equivalent to 20 per cent of its profits, these shares to be given to accountable regional fund management boards at no cost. The employees of any concern were only to hold a minority of its shares, with the majority to be held by regional boards which would use this ownership to promote a general public interest. While the shares could not be sold the income they yielded would be put to meet social priorities and, as the community’s stake in the large enterprises grew, so would its ability to influence corporate decision-making.

Ginsborg was right to cite Meidner and it is a pity he did not take his consideration a bit further. No doubt the original proposal needs to be refined and corrected in various ways. But it does supply a mechanism – that of the share levy - that might remedy the lack of clout of today’s civil society. It would not guarantee progressive solutions to the problems of everyday life but it would furnish an arena in which they could be advanced. It would build an engine of economic self-government, supply needed resources for child-friendly and elder-friendly programmes, and empower the participatory budgets which Ginsborg favours. Without something like this Ginsborg and friends could be uncomfortably stranded on those ‘sheer faces of capitalism’ for a very long time.

Paul Ginsborg has written an attractive and imaginative work, and made out a strong case for transforming the patterns of everyday life. The book offers many insights and contains passages of great literary force. Ginsborg conveys the enormous purchase of capitalism on today’s world, but neglects many of its points of vulnerability, and therefore ultimately falls short of his own ambition to show how its tyranny over everyday life might be checked or counteracted.


Robin Blackburn teaches at the University of Essex and the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of Banking on Death or Investing in Life: the History and Future of Pensions, Verso 2002.
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