For the past four decades historical Marxism as a body of social thought and radical practice has been systematically attacked. The cold war, the triumphalism of the liberal world after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the spread of a hegemonic common sense naturalising financialised capitalism (in everyday life as credit-driven consumption and as unadulterated greed), the prejudice of the liberal media and the weaknesses of authoritarian vanguardist Marxism have all contributed to discrediting Marxism and even erasing its presence in public discourse, in many countries. However, the deep anti-Marxism of our time is unhinging in the midst of the deepest and most multifaceted systemic crises of modern capitalism. Not only are the limits and contradictions of globalised capitalism apparent for all to see, but the making of deep inequalities, hunger, mass unemployment, ecological crisis and growing violence are reaffirming a class politics and understanding of our social world.

The spectre of Marxism is back but this time freed from the cage of orthodoxy or dogma. Although those who believe Marxism is always right, does not have weaknesses and has all the answers (‘zombie Marxists’), will continue to exist and will also make an appearance in this conjuncture. The world, however, is no longer starry-eyed in the presence of such a radicalism. In the ferment of transnational activism, within the World Social Forum and with the rise of a new Global Left, a heterodox anti-capitalism has come to the fore, open to various resources of critique, imagining different ways of exiting capitalism and consciously seeking a democratic way forward rather than the ‘correct line’. A non-dogmatic and democratic Marxism is finding its way in this context. This volume has provided a glimpse of such a Marxism: its new axes of renewal, themes and challenges.

BEYOND VANGUARD MARXISM

Marxism being in crisis is not new. Even its death has been proclaimed many times in the last century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first crisis of Marxism emerged in the context of mass working-class politics and movements. The looming onset of World War I and positions on imperialist war – reform versus revolution, vanguard versus mass party – were all sources of deep contention and contributed to the crisis of Marxism at that time. After 1917, the Russian Revolution spawned a society that became an object of critical enquiry on the Left.

The history of career assessment spans more than a century, with its origins in the early 1900s. It is a history that is recursively related to the development of career theory and practice. Thus the philosophy of career assessment reflects and informs the career psychology discipline of the times. The predominant approach to career practice through most of the last century was a directive, matching approach resulting from a focus on quantitative career assessment. There is also a long history to qualitative career assessment, but it is a history that has been subsumed by the dominant story of quantitative career assessment (McMahon, 2008; McMahon & Patton, 2006). The first part of this chapter provides an overview of quantitative career assessment and then introduces qualitative career assessment. The second part of the chapter focuses on a qualitative career assessment instrument that has been developed in South Africa, the My System of Career Influences (MSCI) reflection process, beginning with an introduction to its theoretical foundation, the Systems Theory Framework (STF) of career development.

Quantitative career testing

De Bruin and De Bruin (2006) make an important distinction between the words ‘testing’ and ‘assessment’. Psychological testing means just that – the administration, scoring and collating of tests, which in career counselling could involve abilities, interests, values and personality traits. Assessment, on the other hand, is a broader, more holistic concept which is inclusive of but not limited to psychological testing. Assessment reflects a process of giving meaning to information (psychometric or otherwise); it promotes greater career and selfexploration in a client. This section describes testing in career counselling, while the next section examines the role of assessment in career counselling.

Much of the history of career psychology has reflected on the dominant role of testing. There is general agreement that the dominant role of career testing evident internationally is similarly reflected at a national level. Lamprecht (2002, p.121), for instance, states that career counselling in South Africa has ‘over the last 50 years been dominated by the practice of standardised, psychometric tests’.

School readiness is a crucial construct in the life of a child: being ready to learn and to interact meaningfully with a group of peers and teachers is predictive of later achievement, resilience and well-being (Duncan et al., 2007; Edwards, Baxter, Smart, Sarson & Hayes, 2009). By assessing how ready a child is to make the transition to a formal school environment, and how ready the child is to learn formally, it becomes possible to identify children who are at risk of poorer outcomes (Roodt, Stroud, Foxcroft & Elkonin, 2009). Identification of risk is not done to label children, but rather to extend a helping hand to children who have not yet developed the necessary foundational cognitive, perceptual, physical, social and emotional skills to cope with the multiple demands of formal schooling. This helping hand comes in the form of recommendations for timely, suitable interventions that can potentially enable children to navigate pathways towards resilience.

Drawing on ten years of professional experience as a practising educational psychologist, I will comment in this chapter on how school readiness can be assessed using the Junior South African Individual Scales (JSAIS). Following a brief introduction to the JSAIS, I will draw the reader's attention to the limitations of the JSAIS as a school readiness measure and suggest ways in which psychometrists and psychologists can compensate for this. I will provide pointers to using the JSAIS diagnostically with regard to social and emotional readiness for school, concentration difficulties, language barriers and physical difficulties. I will also emphasise that interpretation of JSAIS results should be nuanced by cognisance of the realities of our multicultural and violent South African context. In essence, this chapter will aim to encourage interns and practitioners not to limit the JSAIS to use as a measure of intelligence, but to use it as a tool to comment qualitatively (rather than just quantitatively) on children's readiness for formal learning.

Defining school readiness

Simply put, school readiness is concerned with how prepared, or ready, a child is to profit from schooling (Reber & Reber, 2001). Despite the apparent simplicity of the aforementioned statement, school readiness is a widely debated term and one that often causes parents and preschool teachers, not to mention children themselves, some distress.

This chapter is devoted to the current position of neuropsychological assessment in the South African context. With this in mind, a short overview defining the field and the profession is presented, followed by a review of neuropsychological assessment. A discussion follows of the major issues facing neuropsychological assessment in the South African context, including test adaptation. A brief discussion of the way forward concludes the chapter.

Defining neuropsychology

The term ‘neuropsychology’ may have its origins in the 16th century (Boeglin & Thomas, 1996), but general consensus is that the first modern use of the term can be attributed to William Osler in 1931 and later Donald Hebb in 1949 (Kolb & Whishaw, 1996). Neuropsychology is frequently defined as the relationship between brain functioning and behaviour, but with the collapse of Cartesian dualism, this focus has been expanded to include the study of the mind (Wilkinson, 2004). With the mind today seen as the output of the brain's neuronal connectivity (Le Doux, 2002), it is therefore available for objective consideration as well. Although open to debate, modern neuropsychology thus encompasses not only the understanding and interpretation of structural/functional brain systems, particularly in neuropathology, but includes broader understandings such as the effect of psychotherapy on brain functioning (Gabbard, 2000; 2006), the neurobiology of personality (Bergvall, Nilsson & Hansen, 2003; Blair, 2003), and the neurobiology of sense of self (Solms, 2006).

There have been two dominant traditions in neuropsychology: a syndromebased clinical approach and a cognitive neuroscientific approach. Clinical neuropsychology as understood today was first practised in the late 19th century with the cortical localisation of function by Dax, Broca, Wernicke and Charcot (Solms, 2008; Zillmer, Spiers & Culbertson, 2008). It is dependent upon a clinico anatomical analysis, using the medical model as its theoretical basis. Cognitive neuropsychology, first named in the late 1970s (Gazzaniga, Ivry & Mangun, 2009), grew out of cognitive psychology and neuroscience and assumes that mental activities operate in terms of specialised subsystems or modules that can be separated out (dissociated) from each other (Gazzaniga et al., 2009; Sternberg, 2009). It maintains close links to information processing and artificial intelligence (Reed, 2010).

The novel ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six has become Rive's best-selling work. It was a prescribed work for matriculants in the Western Cape from 1997 to 1999 and is still set by teachers at various high school grade levels throughout South Africa. It has been published in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the USA, and translated into many languages including Italian, French and Spanish. It is Rive's most successful work of fiction, both in terms of sales and its impact and popular reception. Unlike his previous work, though, the novel has received minimal serious critical attention, with only a few references to the work by scholars such as Zoe Wicomb and Brenna Munro. Wicomb, in a chapter in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly's Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995, addresses the question of shame in the formulation of coloured identity. She finds ‘neither the place nor the affectionate portrayal of characters is sentimentalized; the autobiographical text is marked by the ethnographic’ in descriptions of generalised life in the District. Wicomb also finds moments in the novel that ‘covertly or uneasily refer to shame’. In contrast, Zakes Mda dismisses the work as marred by nostalgia.

The novel started life in 1984 as a commissioned newspaper story about childhood and Christmas in District Six. In an interview with Mark Bowman in South in 1989, Rive says: ‘Five or six years ago a local newspaper asked me to write something about a child's Christmas in District Six. I tried to start something every June for a few years until, in 1986, I got stuck in and it just took off. I realised it had become a novel.’ The novel is about colourful, memorable characters in a row of houses called ‘Buckingham Palace’, a fictionalised version of Rive's first home in Eaton Place, in Caledon Street in the District.

Local and international research provides considerable evidence that the early years of children's lives are critical for their future development. Assessment measures can be used effectively to prevent, identify and address barriers to learning and development. Most psychology practitioners would agree that both formal and informal assessment procedures can guide parents, caregivers and educators in establishing a solid foundation for children's growth, development and potential through the provision of optimal enrichment and learning activities, as well as socio-emotional support.

The primary purpose of school readiness assessment is to predict readiness for school entry and to identify preschool children who may benefit from additional stimulation programmes, learning support or retention. Focus is placed on physical development, cognitive skills and academic readiness, as well as on the child's socio-emotional functioning. Factors considered in school readiness assessment include the child's emotional maturity, ability to follow directions, and ability to work cooperatively with peers and adult figures. In addition to early identification and support, a school readiness assessment can also serve the purpose of reassuring parents and caregivers that their child is progressing adequately. In some instances a child may be accepted a year early into school to accommodate his or her need for accelerated learning.

While school readiness assessment is an established field of practice, it has generated a great deal of controversy amongst practitioners and researchers (Carlton & Winsler, 1999; Dockett & Perry, 2009; Freeman & Brown, 2008; Goldblatt, 2004; Graue, 2006; Maxwell & Clifford, 2004). It remains a highly contentious issue in South Africa for several reasons. Concerns have been raised about the historical misuse of assessment measures, which have been seen as perpetuating exclusionary practices and an inequitable education system (Kriegler & Skuy, 1996). Some of the intellectual and school readiness assessment tools that have been locally developed have outdated norms (Foxcroft, Paterson, Le Roux & Herbst, 2004). In addition, many were not normed on a fully representative South African sample. Examples are the Junior South African Individual Scales (JSAIS) (published in 1981 and standardised for English- and Afrikaans-speaking individuals) and the Aptitude Test for School Beginners (ASB). The latter is an individually/group-administered school readiness test which was first devised in 1974 (and revised in 1994), to be used from the sixth to the eighth week of the school year.

There is now increased recognition of the severity of the ecological crisis facing our planet, to the extent that even the president of a leading industrialised nation recently questioned the growth/consumption paradigm based on the abundant availability of natural resources, in particular fossil fuels such as oil. The sustainability of economic growth is in doubt because of the rapid depletion of non-renewable fossil fuels (particularly peak oil) and because of carbon emissions from the use of these fossil fuels in production and consumption processes. This has caused climate change resulting in, amongst other things, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, floods, drought and a host of other human-induced ‘natural’ disasters which can destroy the earth as we know it (Gore 2009; Magdoff and Foster 2011). In addition, other pollutants from industrial processes, such as acid mine drainage, acid rain and other toxins have polluted the air and rivers, destroying livelihoods and causing a wide range of public health problems, including new diseases that modern medicine is unable to cure (Hallowes 2011). The rapid advancement of industrial and urban growth is also destroying delicate local ecosystems, making a wide range of flora and fauna extinct, thus threatening the planet's precious biodiversity that holds the key to much of the hitherto-unknown inner workings of the entire ecosystem that governs the earth's existence (Cock 2007).

This ‘eco-logic’ of industrial capitalism (Friedman 2008) is an intricate web of economic and ecological processes that feed off each other, with very specific social consequences. While the social critique of capitalism (pivoted around the capital–labour contradiction) is associated with Marxist and neo-Marxist paradigms that have emerged over the past century and a half, the ecological critique has been mainly the preserve of environmentalists who have drawn inspiration from non-Western thought (including Native American and Eastern philosophical thought). Indeed, Marx and the varieties of Marxism that flowed out of his thinking over the past century have usually been lumped together with other products of the Enlightenment, allegedly sharing a similar anthropocentric belief in the domination of nature (itself a product of Christian thinking), but departing from Christianity in its belief in the wonders of science and technology and the idea of historical progress (Barry 2004; Ponting 2007).

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), one of the most original Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's regime in 1926 for his radical ideas and his leadership of the Italian Communist Party. He began writing his highly influential Prison Notebooks in 1929, the year the New York Stock Exchange crashed and capitalism entered the ‘Great Depression’. A central aspect of the problematic informing the Prison Notebooks is the ability of capitalism to reproduce itself through ruling-class strategies. At the same time, Gramsci's Prison Notebooks pondered how to elaborate a politics capable of transforming capitalism without degenerating into revolutionary voluntarism on the one hand, and economic determinism on the other. Today the world is living through the ‘Great Depression’ of the twenty-first century. In this context, drawing on Gramsci's theoretical corpus critically is extremely important to provide insight into the nature of the hegemonic crisis of capital; how ruling classes are responding to this crisis and how struggles for alternatives can be waged.

I begin this chapter by clarifying which Gramscian Marxism has to be transnationalised. This is important, given that Gramsci's own Marxism has been overlayed and in some senses obscured by varied interpretations, readings and sometimes abuses. Within twentieth-century Marxism, Gramsci has been reduced to a Western Marxist, an Italian Marxist–Leninist and even a Eurocommunist social democrat. First, I reconnect with the universal and critical core of Gramsci's own historical materialism. It is this historical materialism that is central to the project of transnationalising Gramscian Marxism in the twenty-first century. Second, I locate and trace how Gramsci's historical materialism has been brought into international relations and the global political economy. For the greater part of the twentieth century, Gramsci's Marxism has been considered irrelevant to understanding the expansionary tendencies and dynamics of capitalism. However, this has changed as the twentieth-century journey of Gramsci's Marxism inspired the emergence of a neo-Gramscian outgrowth. This transnationalising current of Gramsci's Marxism has challenged the mainstream orthodoxies of twentieth-century Marxism in terms of understanding the international dimension of capitalism.

To a large extent the rise of neo-Gramscian perspectives has engendered a crucial development ensuring Gramsci's Marxism a place in critical analyses of global capitalism and contributing to transformative politics. While this is both a novel and a creative theoretical outpouring, the neo-Gramscian moment is far from complete in terms of transnationalising Gramscian Marxism.

THE first musical instruments of South Africa to be described by travellers were, so far as I can discover, flutes of reed which were played by bands of performers, each of whom was responsible for a single note. I have elsewhere dealt fully with the history, distribution, manufacture, and use of the instruments employed in these ensembles, giving in full practically every reference of importance to them from the earliest times to the present. I shall therefore epitomize here the more salient facts relating to them.

In 1497 Vasco da Gama, on landing at Cape St. Blaise, near Mossel Bay, was greeted by a band of Cape Hottentots who performed upon four or five flutes of reed. The survivors of the ill-fated S. João Baptista, wrecked in 1622 off the south coast of Africa, probably heard Cape Hottentots performing upon reed-flutes. Bogaert in 1711, and Valentyn in 1726, also described reed-flute ensembles of the Cape Hottentots. None of these descriptions, however, give us details, although it is obvious that the bands were identical with those to be mentioned next.

The first description of the reed-flute ensemble among the Nama Hottentots is that of Peter van Meerhoff, 1661, and here we see, for the first time in history, something of its true nature. There were between one and two hundred flute-players, each with a hollow reed in his hand, who danced in a circle, blowing upon their instruments, while in the centre was a man, the ‘master of ceremonies’, holding a long stick. The sound of the reeds, which were played in harmony, was, according to van Meerhoff, like that of trumpets. Dapper, in 1668, and Ogilby, in 1670, echo van Meerhoff 's description, and Schreyer (1669–77) merely mentions the Nama flutes; but the report of the expedition to Namaqualand of Simon Van der Stel in 1685 gives us fresh information. The Nama brought out their band of reed-flutes in honour of Van der Stel's birthday.

This chapter is set against the backdrop of a post-apartheid South African society that requires radical transformation of its institutions and organisations in order to attain the ideals of a just and equitable social order. The need for the transformation of South African organisations has been recognised at all levels of the South African economy. At a national, policy-making level the need for transformation has been acknowledged in various forms of legislation and policy – notably legislation and policy relating to black economic empowerment (BEE) and employment equity. At an organisational level there has also been a growing appreciation of the need for transformation, partly in response to the broader legislative environment but also in response to the increasing diversity of the South African workplace, the challenges of globalisation, and the need to redress past inequities.

Depending on how they are used, psychological assessment instruments can play a role either in organisational transformation or in maintaining the status quo. Psychometric tests and other forms of assessment take on a gatekeeping role when used in an organisational context, and therefore can be a key determinant of access to both employment opportunities as well as career mobility. To quote Sehlapelo and Terre Blanche (1996, p.49):

Other authors, including Claassen (1997), Foxcroft (1997) and Nzimande (1995), have made similar claims. Criticisms of assessment instruments (particularly psychometric tests) in use in South African organisations include the fact that many psychometric tests are not standardised for use on a South African population and are thus inherently culturally biased (Bedell, Van Eeden & Van Staden, 1999; Wallis & Birt, 2003). Critical reviews of assessment tools and practices in South Africa have thus contributed to a body of knowledge that positions assessment as a contested terrain.