CAPE TIMES TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2011
Choosing a career is a tough decision and needs good guidance, research
Ann Werner
A FEW lucky people discover their
chosen careers at an early age and
never look back. For most of us,
though, it involves much soul search-
ing, research, job shadowing, net-
working, and liaison with others in
potentially attractive professions, and
it is here that the economic chasm
between our schools is most marked.
There is also a huge gap in oppor-
tunities between the “haves” and the
“have-nots”, and we need to gal-
vanise those in formal and informal
employment to bring career options
to as many pupils as possible.
From the outset, it is important
to note that it is the responsibility of
COMMUNITY CURRENCIES
How money can become democratic
Saul Wainwright
MOST of us assume money is an apo-
litical entity, which is natural and
therefore not really up for question.
However, there are over 6 000
communities around the world that
don’t believe this. For these commu-
nities, money is not a given and it is
certainly not apolitical.
These communities are at the
forefront of financial ingenuity, cre-
ating what is termed community
currencies (CCs). This term covers a
range of monetary experiments,
some far more radical than others.
This experimentation with CCs
is not a new idea. It goes back at least
to the 1930s and the works of people
like Silvio Gessel, an advocate for
free money. He influenced the likes
of John Maynard Keynes, the great
British economist whose ideas
helped save the capitalist economy
from a depression.
Almost all the experiments of
the 1930s were doomed by the ability
of the political-economic powers,
namely the state and private banks,
to quash all of them. This is despite
the fact that several of these CCs
appeared to be successful in dealing
with the issue of unemployment
during the height of the Great
Depression.
For example, the small town of
Worgl, in Austria, reduced its unem-
ployment from 30 percent to almost
zero over 18 months.
The experiment was only shut
down at the insistence of the local
socialist party and the Austrian Cen-
tral Bank. Then the town’s economy
degenerated into a bankrupt and
unemployed community and didn’t
recover until World War II.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s that
people like Michael Linton (the cre-
ator of one of the biggest commu-
nity currency technologies called
LETS – Local Exchange Trading
System), and ecological economists
like Herman Daly (an ex-senior
economist at the World Bank who
advocates a non-debt based mone-
tary system), started talking seri-
ously about experimenting with
alternative ways of creating money.
Today these 6 000-plus communi-
ties around the world are experi-
menting with ways of creating
money that is not dependent on pri-
vate banks or the state, and rarely
use any form of bank-debt created
money with interest.
Jacob’s ladder short a few rungs Zuma makes mediocrity our gold standard
LIKE everyone else, I sat up late last
week waiting for President Jacob
Zuma to resign. The scrambled eggs
that pass for Facebook and Twitter
posts were agog with speculation
that he would flee the country in a
prayer-powered Gripen – resigning
himself to exile in some favourable,
US-backed despotism, perhaps The
Ivory Coast or Lesotho – where shep-
herds steal their flocks by night and
have halted Aids in its tracks by
female circumcision.
If I understood correctly, Zuma
proposed to give away R20 billion to
the growing numbers of PhDs who
can’t find jobs. Decent jobs. No-one
wants to serve bubbling pizzas and
pastas at Col’Cacchio in Cavendish
Square, particularly if the diners
are rushing off to see The King’s
Speech round the corner. And if you
are nabbed, you have to return to the
Congo or Rwanda where your life
expectancy will resemble the 47 sec-
onds in the Battle of Stalingrad.
A decent job, of course, would be
to run a theatrical company in
which threatening sounds are made
at the audience but little else hap-
pens; the Athol Fugard in Wood-
stock is there for the taking. How-
ever, is R20 billion really enough? If
you divide it by the number of itin-
erant PhDs you arrive at about
R3 800 per person. Once off.
the individual to find a career that
suits him or her: career determina-
tion should never be prescriptive,
giving someone else the onerous
task of “dictating” what it is that
they feel an individual should be
doing with his or her life.
But first it is about getting to the
essence of who one really is, which
is tough for many, let alone
teenagers who have had little insight
into the “real world”. It is therefore
vital to put structures in place to
determine an individual’s skills and
proficiencies, interests and pas-
sions, and challenges and concerns,
not only for fledgling career
thoughts, but also for tertiary educa-
tion choices, if indeed that is indi-
The radicalism of these CCs falls
along a spectrum from merely soft-
ening the impacts of market failures
on local communities (complemen-
tary currencies that don’t challenge
the national currencies), to experi-
ments in potentially radical non-cap-
italist economic relations. All of this
is dependent on an understanding of
money that pays close attention to
the historical political-economic
development of capitalism.
The development of capitalist
money (the money that dominates
our economic space) is neither a
given nor a natural unfolding, but is
rather the product of a particular
and specific history.
The development of today’s
money can be seen as the history of
efforts to control its creation to sus-
tain the importance or relevance of
what Karl Polanyi, the author of The
Great Transformation, called the
three fictitious commodities; land,
labour and money.
Money is no more a given fact
than is private property or wage
labour – all three are socially con-
structed and reinforced. Land is not
inherently private and is therefore
capitalist. Labour is not inherently
for sale and is therefore capitalist.
And money is not inherently scarce
and is therefore capitalist.
All three of these fictitious com-
modities can operate according to
different rules. Labour does not have
to be sold, land does not have to be
private and money does not have to
be scarce; they only have to have
these characteristics so that they
can operate within the capitalist
framework.
The changes that money has gone
through – moving from shells to a sys-
tem of paper and gold, to a system of
pure paper money, and increasingly
purely digitised – have all come about
in response to problems in the
political economy. Problems that, if
capitalism as a system was to survive,
needed to be solved.
Money is scarce because it needs
to be so in order for the capitalist
economy to function.
Without this scarcity the other
two fictitious commodities would
not be able to exist as products.
Within a capitalist society, if
money becomes abundant it causes
the economy to collapse – either in
the form of bubbles, which ulti-
mately burst (asset or stock market)
or inflation.
In a State
peter wilhelm
This won’t even pay for the can-
dles you need to light the ferocious
grimacing and squawking of the
hungry cultural workers on stage.
Yet another black mark against
Zuma. Not to mention the serial
marriages and whale oil with which
to buff his head. As for switching off
electricity to save energy, how will
we watch the SABC?
Further, since we now learn that
it cost R100 million to stage the
World Festival of Youth and Stu-
dents, I think it obvious that R3 800
per person won’t keep us in ciga-
rettes for a week, since everything
costs more now that the oil price is
zooming. Thank goodness the Karoo
is now to be mined for natural gas
and we may soon not have to rely on
extensions of hosepipes leading
from Julius Malema’s rear end.
I also think there’s lot of coal in
the useless game reserves that the
apartheid regime saddled us with;
and if you want someone to run a
State-owned mining company, I rec-
ommend my disgusting and thievish
neighbour, Gatvol van der Pomp.
Such peevish thoughts were
cated. This is especially true within
our shifting South African context.
Normal distribution, as depicted
by the recently topical matric bell
curve, indicates that some pupils
will get straight As, some won’t get
any As at all, and the vast majority
will fall between these two extremes,
just the way that it was meant to be:
each individual offers unique attrib-
utes and characteristics which pop-
ulate this bell curve and cater for the
myriad career options. It is therefore
critical for pupils to understand
their own characteristics and their
uniqueness, and realise that each
one of them potentially has a role to
fill in the workplace. This will go far
in developing their confidence, but
LOSING VALUE: SA needs to re-examine its unstable financial system and follow the lead of 6 000 communities who trade without cash, says the writer.
Each time one of these elements
develop, drastic measures are taken
to redesign the monetary system –
the creation of the Federal Reserve
in the USA, the gold-standard sys-
tem, the Bretton Woods System and
finally today’s digital fiat money
system.
We redesign it each time with the
same purpose: to preserve the capi-
talist economy of private property
and debtor/creditor relations.
This scarcity of money is then a
churning my neurons when it
occurred to me that Zuma evidently
had no intention of resigning!
What a disappointment. I hastily
twiddled the knobs of my gerbil-
driven TV set and landed on Al
Jazeera, an independent channel
much relied upon my other neigh-
bour, who is building a mosque.
Hosni “Gatvol” Mubarak would
appear to have been the one every-
body wanted to flee – instantly, if not
before. But what a tease, worse than
Zuma! In the end, crowds of people
wailed inconsolably or cheered
when they discovered they would be
getting a brand-new dictatorship.
There was some comfort in the
speculation that a sober, middle-of-
the-road, faith-based group of schol-
ars called al-Qaeda could take over.
Since South Africa appears not to
have decided – unlike America – to
open its doors to the world’s “tired,
your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free – the
wretched refuse of your teeming
shore” it looks as if they will all
have to find sanctuary within the
kindly armpits of al-Qaeda.
If I had really wanted to avoid
confusion, I should have turned to
yet another channel and watched
Friday the Thirteenth – Part II.
That would have been quite grue-
some enough.
will also provide essential insight
into their career determination.
But, how does an individual get
to that place of greater knowledge of
self and become aware of opportuni-
ties in the marketplace? And how
does one know one’s decisions are
the best ones?
For the fortunate few, a useful
start is career evenings organised by
their schools, attended by represen-
tatives of tertiary institutions who
advertise academic options; organi-
sations offering special pro-
grammes, learnerships and scholar-
ships; companies selling gap year
opportunities; and established pro-
fessionals, or past pupils, who are
studying towards qualifications.
critical element in the capitalist
economy, but unlike labour and land
(which are grounded by the natural
laws of scarcity; there is only so
much land and so much labour time
available), the supply of money is
grounded by no such constraints.
With this understanding of
money, we can ask specifically what
this means in the South African con-
text. We claim to be a democracy but
our democracy continues to fail to
deal with the deeper questions of
NOT BAD at all. Actually a good
speech because he cleverly
addressed all the factions in the rul-
ing party. A good thing that he
focused on job creation. He sounded
almost statesman-like. Ja-nee, all is
well in sunny South Africa.
This seems to be the general
reaction to President Jacob Zuma’s
State of the Nation address in Par-
liament last week. I thought it was
a dismal speech. At the end of it, I
was more than disappointed; I was
angry.
We have been so conditioned by
the all-consuming faction fights in
the ANC and the utter lack of vision
and leadership from Zuma and his
ineffectual cabinet that we rejoice at
the mediocre because at least it
isn’t a disaster. The people of South
Africa deserve more than this.
Zuma’s cheering commando
inside the ANC hail his address as
a magnificent performance by a
man of the people. Zuma apologists,
some parading as political analysts,
feel they have to remind us that the
president is not expected to explain
policy or give any detail of his
grand schemes when he opens Par-
liament; that happens at the
Finance Minister’s budget speech
and other occasions.
What nonsense. Zuma has bro-
ken years of tradition by moving
Many schools
don’t organise
career evenings.
Many can’t
Many go on to “job shadow” a
trained professional for a day or two.
But, many schools don’t organise
such events. Many can’t.
Towards the end of last year I
spent time with pupils at a Cape
Flats high school. It has no library,
there is no designated career coun-
sellor, or any staff member to man-
systemic poverty, unemployment,
and inequality. These questions are
relevant to a concept of democracy
that believes that socio-economic
questions need to be answered
within the framework of a viable
democratic society.
If money were to become truly
democratic, that is being controlled,
created and shared equitably, what
would our democracy look like?
And, would it be dominated by a
more democratic economy? The pos-
sibility of our monetary system col-
lapsing is a real prospect high-
lighted by the financial crises of the
past two-plus years.
What sort of monetary system
would we want if democracy, equal-
ity, and ending poverty and environ-
mental destruction is a true goal?
If money is neither given nor
guaranteed to survive then it
behoves us, as a country that is
struggling with deep structural
issues to experiment with and study
some of these alternatives. Geoffrey
Pale Native
max du preez
the opening of Parliament to a
Thursday evening exactly so more
citizens can follow his speech on tel-
evision and radio. This is the one
occasion where the president of
South Africa should communicate
with the citizens – not the lame,
badly organised so-called imbizos
“with the ordinary people” during
the course of the year or when he
talks at ANC functions.
I am a citizen and Jacob Zuma is
my president. On Thursday night I
made myself comfortable in front
of my TV because my president
was going to speak to me about the
state of my country and tell me
about his vision for the future. I did-
n’t need passages from Shake-
speare. I just wanted my president
to communicate with me.
My president let me down. He
couldn’t even read his lines prop-
erly and fluffed several words. It
was the predictable, bland speech
written by a bunch of apparatchiks
for a party leader who wants to
throw out a bone to every dog in the
neighbourhood. I was yearning for
some straight talk; for a sense of
age a career office/centre, there are
no job shadowing opportunities
other than self-initiated, and access
to the internet for career research is
only sporadic. Although the teach-
ers do what they can to create career
awareness and private enterprise
has, to a small extent, begun to offer
learnerships in unskilled trades,
pupils have little exposure to the
wide range of available careers.
This school is just one of many
hundreds without adequate
resources, and it illustrates clearly
the limited career and development
opportunities available to the bulk of
our future workforce.
In light of President Jacob
Zuma’s attempts to make tertiary
Ingham, at Cambridge University,
has argued that, “The scarcity of
money is always the result of very
carefully constructed social and
political arrangements”.
Several governments around the
world have begun to recognise the
potential benefits of supporting CCs
– or at least not preventing their cre-
ation and proliferation.
Recently, the Brazilian Central
Bank gave its blessing to several
experiments using CCs to help bol-
ster local economies, while local
governments around Japan have
supported the creation of CCs to
help pay for a range of services,
such as providing care to the elderly.
These currencies have been
designed in a way that have specific
goals – often not necessarily to
replace the national currencies but
to act in a complementary way.
A recent paper by Bernard
Lietaer, one of the minds behind the
creation of the euro, calls for the
need to diversify our monetary sys-
energy; for a clear commitment to
arrest our country’s slide down the
slippery slope of corruption, enti-
tlement and laissez faire.
For anyone outside the circle of
ANC faithful to praise the speech
would boil down to the soft bigotry
of low expectations.
I was happy that Zuma focused
on job-creation. I heard him say he
was going to throw money at the
problem. Lots of money. I know
other governments have also done
that and it turned out to be a waste
of taxpayer’s money. He didn’t tell
me why his way was going to be dif-
ferent. Was he really going to get
millions of people proper long-term
employment through public works
schemes? Zuma is an intelligent
man with some very clever advisers
on economic matters. Surely he
knows what the real impediments
are to creating jobs? But some of
his constituents don’t want to hear
that, so he can’t say that.
I was happy to hear him say the
focus in education should be teach-
ing, time and textbooks. As he said
it, I knew that the kids in the East-
ern Cape were still without books
and millions of pupils were attend-
ing schools in ruins or makeshift
structures. Empty words.
My ears pricked up when he
talked about the minerals of the
INSIGHT 9
education available to all, surely it is
time for national or regional author-
ities to put together a two- or three-
day conference for the thousands of
pupils who have no access to poten-
tial career opportunities.
It is incumbent on every one of
us to redress the imbalances of the
past by developing those “who have
not had” and encouraging them to
join us in our quest for excellence.
As Madiba says: “Overcoming
poverty is not a gesture of charity. It
is an act of justice. It is the protec-
tion of a fundamental human right,
the right to dignity and a decent
life”.
● Werner is an industrial psychol-
ogist and career facilitator
tem and create a multiplicity of cur-
rencies, and therefore greater eco-
nomic resilience.
Joseph Edozien, chairman of the
SA New Economics Network
(SANE), in a series of articles titled
“Ending Economic Apartheid” and
“Restorative Economic Justice for
South Africa”, has articulated a new
employment-creating multicur-
rency financial architecture for
South Africa, which includes state-
encouraged debt-free non-interest
bearing community currencies.
The aim is to stimulate self-help
transactions and effective demand
in impoverished communities, with
little realistic hope of genuine eco-
nomic engagement with the rand
system on terms which reduce
poverty and dependency.
As South Africa continues to
debate solutions to its structural
issues and the inability to solve
these within the framework of our
current financial system, the impor-
tance of exploring alternatives that
could have positive developmental
impacts on local communities is of
vital importance and interest.
South Africa and our economic
policy makers need to seriously
engage these options. I, along with
several other academics, believe that
our financial system is inherently
unstable. However, we can solve
some of our deep issues through
experimentation in community
currencies.
For more information on how
these ideas can be implemented in
the South African context see the
work of the South African New Eco-
nomics Network at www.sane.org.za
● Wainwright is completing his
Masters at UCT in the Philosophy,
Politics and Economics programme,
with his thesis entitled “Democratisa-
tion of Money”. He is a Visiting Stu-
dent Researcher at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he
received his BA with Honours in
Political Economics. He works as a
Practice Associate at Adaptive Edge,
a futures foresight and scenario plan-
ning consultancy.
This article is part of the National
Dialogue Initiative by the Ministry of
Economic Development in associa-
tion with the Cape Times and the SA
New Economies (SANE) network.
Earlier contributions can be found at
www.sane.org.za To contribute to the
series e-mail creditor@inl.co.za not
exceeding 1 600 words.
country belonging to the people.
But when he became vague about
the issue, I realised he was actually
talking to Julius Malema in the
public gallery.
Immediately after the speech I
heard Malema declare in an inter-
view that Zuma was endorsing the
nationalisation of mines and
shortly after that the minister of
mines denied it. In a Sunday paper
three days later Zuma was asked
whether his words meant a green
light to nationalisation, and he
answered: I don’t think it does. He
doesn’t think – but wait, those were
his own words, weren’t they, surely
he must know what he meant?
As he was finishing his bland
sentence on welcoming the regime
change in Egypt and the will of the
people of that country, I was sure he
was going to at least say something
about the will of the people of
Zimbabwe, where a new reign of
terror has just been unleashed.
Not a peep from the president
of the leading country on the sub-
continent.
Thursday night’s speech was
more about the ANC than about the
state of the nation.
Zuma the Great Listener, the
Man of the People. Ja, right. More
like the Great Disappointment, the
Man of the Party.