A detailed program is now online for the 10th conference of the International Communal Studies Association in Israel this June. It looks like a great line-up, although I noticed that the panel on which I’ll be sitting (and discussing the kibbutz in documentary film and “privatization cinema”) starts at 8:30 in the morning. Ouch.
The roster includes a number of Israeli kibbutz experts I interviewed last year (Shlomo Getz, Michal Palgi, Yuval Achouch, Uri Leviatan, David Amitai, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yakov Oved, Menachem Topel, Eli Tzur) as well as other scholars that I am keen to meet on this trip, including Jan Bang (eco-village expert), Henry Near (author of the definitive history of the kibbutz movement), Yuval Dror (education scholar of the new urban kibbutzim), Michael Livni (of Kibbutz Lotan, an authority on Reform Judaism and the eco-kibbutz), and Yehuda Paz (from the Negev Institute for Peace).
These are just the names I recognize; I’m sure many of the other speakers will be able to provide invaluable perspectives on the kibbutz and the international communal movement. In fact, I feel like a kid in a candy shop — eager to gobble up everything in sight, and disappointed I’ll have to make some tough choices: there are always two different sessions to choose from at each time slot, and I can’t (yet!) be two places at once. It should be a great conference.
The final article in the excellent series on the “sharing economy”, in B.C.’s must-read online newsmagazine The Tyee, focuses on the social, economic and environmental promise of co-housing. The conclusion: living together is not just for hippies anymore.
As kibbutzniks know, sharing accommodation and other resources in a so-called “intentional community” (an odd phrase, as it implies the rest of us live in an “un-intentional community”, which I suppose is often true) makes a lot of sense, both for personal savings and ecological impact. North Americans’ hunger for bigger houses in car-centric suburban locales has turned us into environmental dinosaurs, gobbling up the planet’s resources even as we stumble blindly toward the extinction of this lifestyle in the coming age of peak oil. (To say nothing of the oil on our collective hands from the current eco-catastrophe along the coast of Louisiana thanks to our “drill, baby drill!” appetite for a high-carbon diet.)
Learning to live together might mean learning to live more lightly on the earth. Much of the current recession, set in motion by bankers’ greedy schemes of subprime mortgages, can be linked to the collective “house lust” of North Americans, in which realty began to bear little resemblance to reality, as the Tyee article makes clear:
When the U.S. housing bubble burst in 2006, entire planned neighborhoods went bankrupt, rows of McMansions were unoccupied, sidewalks ended in the middle of fields, blue-collar investors left owing millions to banks that had no business loaning them the money in the first place.
What these investors, developers, and banks lacked was a sense of community, a view of the home’s primacy as a social space rather than a commodity. It’s a bit obvious to say that the real estate bust was fostered by those who cared only for the value of a house rather than the value of a home, but it wasn’t obvious enough to the hordes who bought into the pyramid and then were surprised to find themselves crushed by the weight of the bricks.
Living in a co-housing situation, like living in a kibbutz, takes some adjustment and isn’t for every personality. But the potential good of this “sharing economy” (a hopeful phrase I’ve come to like) is powerful:
Accountability lies at the heart of shared living systems, just as it lies at the heart of our environmental issues, the need for each of us to recognize we are citizens of a larger community. Intentional communities stress the responsibilities and benefits of shared living in the same breath, a seemingly instinctual (and often seemingly forgotten) recognition that working for the community pays off double for the individual, both in short-term gains (such as being able to leave your sick child in trusted hands when you go to work) and long-term solutions (such as the dramatic environmental benefits of shared living).
For some, though, the opportunity to connect with others may be reason enough. As [one resident] admits, “I just like having people to say hi to when I come home.”
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.
