The End Of A Noble Plan

[AlexL]

After the failure of the Israeli Kibbutzims (communes):

"...there is one big improvement in [our] lives ... [we] are freer. We don't have to ask the people in charge for permission all the time anymore".

Full article at:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pag...p=1074657885918

Selected quotes:

The kibbutz movement, which is 96 years old, has been on an uneven march away from collectivism and toward individualism in recent decades. Even the most traditional, socialistic, Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim have introduced consumer choice, allowing members to dispose of their income any way they want, which would have been rejected as heresy 20 years ago. Among kibbutzim that have abolished income equality, the next major change on the horizon is the division of property and other assets among the members, which will make it impossible, or at least absurd, to speak of them as kibbutzim at all.

The socialist ideology they [the "founders generation"] were raised on has been utterly rejected by their country, and at least modified by their kibbutzim as well. They can't earn a living, they can't "keep up" economically on their own power. And while the kibbutzim are recovering economically after nearly drowning in debt in the late Eighties and Nineties, they are still, on the whole, running somewhat behind the national average in per capita income.

"Too many of the kibbutzim were living on borrowed money. An old kibbutznik would tell himself, 'Well, the kids have left, but the system still works.' After 1985, it became much more difficult to say that," says Gavron. "There was a huge trauma over what happened at Beit Oren." In 1987, Beit Oren, a kibbutz in the Carmel Mountains that had always had economic difficulties, collapsed...

[T]he founders interviewed were bred on the primary socialist principle of "all work and all workers have equal value," ... All held to that value over the decades of their kibbutz membership. As for the emphasis on the group over the individual that was the social order of the kibbutzim, all ... saw the justice in that, too.

"I laugh at people who say [the kibbutzim's method of arriving at decisions] is bolshevism. It's the opposite of bolshevism. People sit together and discuss and the majority decides. Here, for instance, there are always some people in favor of changing to differential salaries, but they're always in the minority."

... Rubinov reached his kibbutz in 1936 in his early 20s...: "When I got out of the car that took me to Na'an, they told me to take everything out of my suitcases, and they put these clothes over here and said, 'This you take,' and put those clothes over there and said, 'This you leave.' They told me to go to 'that room over there.' I knew this was how it would be. But what was worse was the laundry.

"Every Friday," Rubinov continues, "they would take the underwear down from the lines and hand it out. How? They'd go around with a cart and put whichever underwear came to hand on the member's shelves. They didn't ask whether it fit or not, and this irritated me terribly."

After a while, Rubinov started to complain. He fought to have the underwear numbered according to its wearer so that each member could always have underwear that fit.

"They told me, 'Why are you talking such nonsense. You won't last as a kibbutznik. You want your own things. You have bourgeois ideas,'" he recalls, snickering over the term "bourgeois."

In the Forties or Fifties, he can't remember when, he won – Kibbutz Na'an's underwear began to be numbered. "I still remember – my number was 166," he laughs.

Until about age 30 he drove a tractor, which he enjoyed, and then the kibbutz told him to study to become a teacher, which he did. Work assignments were not a matter of choice, which irritated him terribly.

"They put a note in your metal cup every day that told you where you were to work. It was like you weren't a human being, you were a part in a machine. The kibbutz took away your sense of being an individual. You were a notice in a metal cup," he says.

Sometime in the Fifties or Sixties, after becoming a kibbutz teacher and member of the Histadrut Teachers Union, Rubinov did what he'd wanted to for a long time – he found a teaching job outside the kibbutz and left, staying away for a semester.

"But I went back because my wife [Leyka, who died in 1984] didn't want to leave. She kept saying, 'Soon, soon,' but she never did it, so I went back. If she had come with me, I would have left for good."

... the overwhelming majority of adult children of older kibbutz members in the last 20 years, all left to make lives of their own.

Fridberg sees the advantages of the radical change to differential salaries that took hold this year.

".... People don't want others to live off their work, and there was some of that in the kibbutz."

The couple notes that among the members who started out with them at Nahsholim but later left, nearly all are now much better off financially than they are.

"Those people were able to give their children more than we could," Hava says with a wistful smile. But, the wistfulness gone, she adds, "When I joined the kibbutz movement .... I was taught that a person has to contribute to society. We contributed."

Alex

[JMeganSnow]

Wonderful! Thank you, Alex, this is good news.

Socialism is dying everywhere; this much is evident. What must be stressed is the fact that people will continue to practice it in essence if they are not given something better to replace it.

With the evils of the welfare state in America being made plain in the looting, murder, and rapine in New Orleans, and the Canadian socialized medicine system collapsing, the time is ripe for new voices to be heard.

[Hal]

I find this quite sad. I like the idea of diverse ways of life existing, as a means of combatting what I view as the increased homogenization of the world's culture. The beauty of the kibbutzes was that noone was forced to live in them - there was no violation of rights, it was simply an alternative mode of life existing only for those who sought it, much like a commune. I hope they manage to stay alive, even though I would have no interest in joining one.

Jennifer - the kibbutzes had nothing to do with 'socialism'. Noone was being forced to participate in them, they existed on the edge of Israeli society, not as something trying to inflict their ways of life onto unwilling participants. There would be no contradiction involved if something functionally identical to a kibbutz existed in the midst of a laissez faire society (and indeed, I would want such a thing to exist).

Edited September 3, 2005 by Hal

[khaight]

I find this quite sad. I like the idea of diverse ways of life existing, as a means of combatting what I view as the increased homogenization of the world's culture. The beauty of the kibbutzes was that noone was forced to live in them - there was no violation of rights, it was simply an alternative mode of life existing only for those who sought it, much like a commune.

But (at least based on the quotes from the article, which is about all I know about the kibbutzes), it was an alternative mode of living based on deeply immoral premises. You can't evaluate the kibbutzes without evaluating the merits of the principles they're based on.

An alternative mode of living that involved, say, addiction to crystal meth could be established without violating anybody's rights. That wouldn't make it moral, or attractive. Not everything that people do voluntarily is good.

A process of experimentation is valuable as a means of identifying potential improvements in lifestyle and social institutions. But it's pretty clear that the kibbutzes are a failed experiment. They've demonstrated that the fundamental problem with collectivism isn't that it's based on force, and that's useful knowledge. But the experiment is done now, the lesson is clear.

[daniel]

But (at least based on the quotes from the article, which is about all I know about the kibbutzes), it was an alternative mode of living based on deeply immoral premises.  You can't evaluate the kibbutzes without evaluating the merits of the principles they're based on.

An alternative mode of living that involved, say, addiction to crystal meth could be established without violating anybody's rights.  That wouldn't make it moral, or attractive.  Not everything that people do voluntarily is good.

A process of experimentation is valuable as a means of identifying potential improvements in lifestyle and social institutions.  But it's pretty clear that the kibbutzes are a failed experiment.  They've demonstrated that the fundamental problem with collectivism isn't that it's based on force, and that's useful knowledge.  But the experiment is done now, the lesson is clear.

Quite right. I think conflict is good for society, it is a central dynamic which leads to progress, but when something has proved to be a failure it's time to move on to something new, alot like in business - once mining is not profitable its time for investors to take their money out and put it into something innovative and new, for example, computers. The purpose of conflict is to find the best, conflict and variety does not exist for its own sake.