Privatization takes many forms on the kibbutz. I realized this fact last summer, when I visited both Degania A and Degania B—neighbouring communities since 1920, when Degania A “franchised” a decade after its own founding. Degania A is now a relatively wealthy community (thanks to a factory that makes diamond-cutters), and yet voted (controversially) to privatize in 2007. Degania B, I was told, is struggling economically—and yet has remained a traditional, communal kibbutz.
This contrast goes against the general trend that several experts had explained to me—that the remaining traditional kibbutzim are ones that can afford to stay communal, while the privatized (or “renewed”) kibbutzim have been forced into these changes out of economic necessity. That theory, of course, is a reversal of the long-held assumption of critics of the kibbutz that these rural communities could afford to share everything because they had nothing much to share in the first place.
I stayed in the guest house on Degania B and had a chance to tour the kibbutz. The dining room, like most kibbutzim, charges for meals, and seemed a quiet, rather lifeless room when I had my breakfast. The members may not be millionaires, but the residents of Degania B still have one of the most beautiful swimming pools I’ve had the good fortune to do a few laps in—crystalline waters overlooking the Jordan River Valley. (I’ve sometimes daydreamed about doing a tour of Israel that would involve hop-scotching the length of the country, like the narrator in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”, from one kibbutz pool to the next, and reading the mood of each community from the poolside conversations.)
In the news today, I learned that because of the recent recession, the members of Degania B voted to sell a controlling interest in the kibbutz’s medical products company in exchange for 100 million shekels (roughly $27 million Canadian). In economic terms, while they maintain a communal mode of consumption (in which everyone remains equal), they have been forced to privatize their means of production—a radical departure from the socialist vision of the founders.
I hope to visit both communities again this summer, on the centenary of Degania A’s founding, and observe more carefully the different paths taken by two of the earliest kibbutzim. And maybe do a few more laps in that wonderful pool.
This link includes some classic archival photos from the Shomria Institution, the first kibbutz education centre founded by the Hashomer Hatzair movement. It was located on Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek, overlooking the Yizreel Valley, which I had the good fortune to visit and tour last summer. It is a large, successful and still resolutely communal kibbutz with a storied history (several members have been members of Parliament), including as the site of a major battle during the War of 1948.
Here is an interesting audio interview from 1976 with Noam Chomsky, the famous American linguist and left-wing political critic, about anarchism—or what he calls “left-wing libtertarianism”. “I myself think that the most dramatic example was the Israeli kibbutzim,” he says, when asked for examples of communities successfully based on anarchist principles. (His discussion of the kibbutz’s history begins at about 4:15 mark in the interview.)
In another interview, Chomsky talked about his early interest in the binational vision of the kibbutz movement:
This was 1947, and I had just turned eighteen. I was deeply interested, as I had been for some years, in radical politics with an anarchist or left-wing (anti-Leninist) Marxist flavor, and even more deeply involved in Zionist affairs and activities—or what was then called “Zionist,” though the same ideas and concerns are now called “anti-Zionist.” I was interested in socialist, binationalist options for Palestine, and in the kibbutzim and the whole cooperative labor system that had developed in the Jewish settlement there (the Yishuv), but had never been able to become close to Zionist youth groups that shared these interests because they were either Stalinist or Trotskyite and I always been strongly anti-Bolshevik.
He eventually stayed on a kibbutz for a few months in 1953 and had a positive experience of this spartan, egalitarian community:
The kibbutz where we lived, which was about twenty years old, was then very poor. There was very little food, and work was hard. But I liked it very much in many ways. Abstracting it from context, this was a functioning and very successful libertarian community, so I felt. And I felt it would be possible to find some mixture of intellectual and physical work. I came close to returning there to live, as my wife very much wanted to do at the time.
Almost since the birth of the kibbutz a hundred years ago, different communities have hived off into a handful of different federations that would represent their collective interests and various visions of communal life: religious vs. Marxist, staying small vs. growing bigger, etc. The past 20 years of demographic change and economic privatization, however, have weakened the power and influence of these federations. In fact, after several amalgamations, there is for all intents and purposes only one remaining federation, the Kibbutz Movement, that speaks for all secular kibbutzim.
Recently, two kibbutzim decided to break ties (for now at least) with the main federation over a dispute with the Labour Party (long the movement’s “voice” in the Israeli Parliament) about completing foundations for buildings that would house the children of kibbutz members. The source of the dispute: the two communities are located in the Jordan Valley, near the Dead Sea, on land captured after the Six Day War, in the much-contested region known alternatively (depending on where one perches on the political spectrum) as Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, or The Occupied Territories. To make historical matters more convoluted, one kibbutz—Beit HaAravah—had been founded in 1939, evacuated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and re-established as a military kibbutz outpost in 1980.
What seems like a small dispute—the kibbutzim only wanted to finish the foundations, not the actual buildings, but were ordered to destroy them—escalated into an ideological split. It’s a reminder of how recent changes to the kibbutz movement have made individual communities both more isolated from and independent of the larger kibbutz community—much like the members themselves in their own private lives.
Catching up on my Net-surfing, I read this analysis of the rise and fall and rise of the kibbutz movement in MarketWatch. It’s part of the Wall Street Journal’s digital network, so you can anticipate the bias. It’s definitely typical of the kibbutz-as-failed-socialists-embrace-capitalism slant that J.J. Goldberg critiques.
Still, it’s filled with some interesting facts and financial stats and mentions Kibbutz Shamir (whose stock has doubled since I visited—I should have invested!). And the wide-ranging debate amongst commenters shows how passionate people can get about what the fate of the kibbutz means to the rest of society.
And the article’s conclusion actually lays off the throttle of its otherwise free-market cheerleader tone:
Now numbering 123,000, the new kibbutzniks are financially cautious and ideologically disillusioned, but even so, in an era of global economic perplexity, theirs may yet prove a model for a kinder, gentler, communitarian capitalism.
