Currencies of desire: what's wrong with the money system - and what hope for change? Vanessa Baird draws a few conclusions

Under the present system, money isn't even a real indicator of value. As Frances Hutchinson has pointed out: `There is not the slightest reason to connect a strong financial economy with a strong (or sustainable) real economy. Money does not create wealth. Hard work does not create money. High rewards go to tasks with a dubious social value, while essential tasks receive little reward, if they are rewarded at all.'

This has a well-known feminist dimension, especially poignant for women working in the home, bringing up children or caring for relatives.

So what's to be done? At present banks and financial institutions are unlikely to release their grip on the community's money-power in response to special pleading.

But people are, albeit in a piecemeal way, trying to take control. LETS and other local currency schemes are small but encouraging signs.

The increase in ethical investment is another indication that people are becoming more discerning in requiring that their money is not used to support repressive regimes or harm the environment. This is a start. The next stage is to examine the very basis of banking and investment funds themselves.

Reforming the world's economic system and its money system seems like a massive task, but it affects us all. Nearly all the issues individual NGOs and voluntary organizations are dealing with - be they drugs, homelessness, health, hunger or poverty - are results of the debt money system. Here there is a tremendous potential for political action. (4)

With more cracks showing daily in the edifice of global finance, people are becoming more open to seeking out alternatives. Information and awareness are all-important. So is imagination, if we are to get out of this mess and create the currencies we desire - the simpler, people-centred monies that facilitate life and its transactions instead of entrenching inequalities.

(1) Joe Hanlon, `The World Bank speech that knocked down every pillar', Electronic Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg, 23 June 1998.

(2) Michael Rowbotham, The Grip of Death, Jon Carpenter, Charlbury, 1998.

(3) Frances Hutchinson, What Everybody Really Wants to Know About Money, Jon Carpenter, Charlbury, 1998.

(4) See Alan Armstrong, To Restrain the Red Horse, Towerhouse Publishing Ltd, Dunoon, 1996.

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