I’d never heard the term “self-governing socialism” (in contrast to the “state socialism” of China or the former USSR) before, but recently stumbled across a blog devoted to discussing the idea and its implementation. The kibbutz, of course, is a classic example of the concept—a community based on radical economic equality in which everyone has an equal say, via the general assembly vote, in how things are run. The most recent post on the SGS blog gives a useful overview of the kibbutz movement (with one minor error: A.D. Gordon, the philosopher behind the kibbutz’s “religion of labour”, wasn’t actually a founder of Degania but was later associated with the first kibbutz). I’m especially interested in the many other examples, from around the world, that the author has lassoed under the umbrella of self-governing socialism.
Here’s a cool video about a solar farm recently installed at Kibbutz Yavne, a religious kibbutz south of Tel Aviv. Many kibbutzim, especially in the Negev Desert region of Israel, have invested in green technologies, such as alternative energy and water-conserving irrigation methods. I’m looking forward to touring some of these inspiring facilities when I next visit the country.
When I visited Kibbutz Shamir last June, I was surprised to learn that the kibbutz no longer takes international volunteers, that it hadn’t for five or six years. The reasons were largely economic: since privatization, much of the work formerly done by volunteers is now assigned to kibbutzniks or to hired outside labour, from nearby communities or Asian guest labourers, which maintains a more efficient continuity—you’re not always training a new set of backpackers—for managers.
My friends on the kibbutz said that they missed the volunteers—the energy and new perspectives that they brought to the kibbutz. (Of course, my friends are biased: most are either former volunteers or kibbutzniks who married former volunteers.) When I visited the kibbutz movement’s Volunteer Office in Tel Aviv, there was a line of disappointed travellers who were being told that there were no spots available anywhere at that time, which suggests that other kibbutzim have also cut down or eliminated their use of international itinerant labour.
One kibbutz spokesperson also told me that, despite the line-up I witnessed, volunteering has become less attractive because there are fewer agricultural jobs for young volunteers to do (like me, most come from the city and find toiling in the cotton fields or avocado orchards for a few months an exotic working vacation) and the remaining needs tend to be for “service” jobs like kitchen and clean-up duty—and who wants to travel halfway around the world for a McJob they could get at home?
It’s clear the heyday of the kibbutz volunteer movement has passed. (When I told a friend recently I’d been a volunteer, he said, “That’s a very 80s thing to do.”) Travellers who might once have journeyed to Israel to work on a communal kibbutz or moshav now often head to different countries to do WWOOF’ing—that is, to be a Willing Worker On Organic Farms. There’s a whole movement, which began in the U.K. in 1971 and which I’d first heard about over a decade ago, and I was reminded of it again by a recent article about a WWOOF experience titled “Costa Rica: A 21st-century kibbutz.”
I find it interesting that, for international travellers at least, ecological-minded communities and farms such as the WWOOFers, the Eco-Village Network and the Green Kibbutz Group now embody the spirit of communal learning and adventure that the kibbutz movement as a whole once held out for them.
British academic and historian Tony Judt has been an often controversial Jewish critic of Israeli foreign policy, as well as other ideologies on the left and right. In 2008, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease and is now paralyzed from the neck down but is still, apparently, lecturing and writing. He has been publishing a series of memoirs and reflections in the New York Review of Books, including one titled “Kibbutz” about his early experiences of and passions for “Labour Zionism” and “muscular Judaism” as a young kibbutznik in Israel.
He writes with a typically contrarian slant that, from a memoirist’s position of retrospection, refuses to indulge in nostalgia and instead peels away his early idealism and the surface of kibbutz life to observe more critically the essence of who he and his compatriots really were and what they were doing. As he writes about kibbutz life:
I adored it. Eight hours of strenuous, intellectually undemanding labor in steamy banana plantations by the shores of the Sea of Galilee, interspersed with songs, hikes, lengthy doctrinal discussions (carefully stage-managed so as to reduce the risk of adolescent rejection while maximizing the appeal of shared objectives), and the ever-present suggestion of guilt-free sex: in those days the kibbutz and its accompanying ideological penumbra still retained a hint of the innocent “free love” ethos of early-twentieth-century radical cults.
In reality, of course, these were provincial and rather conservative communities, their ideological rigidity camouflaging the limited horizon of many of their members. Even in the mid-1960s it was clear that the economy of Israel no longer rested on small-scale domestic agriculture; and the care that left-wing kibbutz movements took to avoid employing Arab labor served less to burnish their egalitarian credentials than to isolate them from the inconvenient facts of Middle Eastern life. I’m sure I did not appreciate all this at the time—though I do recall even then wondering why I never met a single Arab in the course of my lengthy kibbutz stays, despite living in close proximity to the most densely populated Arab communities of the country.
You might not always—or ever—agree with Judt’s political take on Israel but it’s hard not to appreciate his attention to detail as a memoir writer and his willingness to chronicle his own naivete, even as he dissects the impassioned illusions of those around him.
I got some good news over the weekend when an email arrived with news that my proposal for a talk had been selected by the organizers of the International Communal Studies Association conference, to be held late next June in Israel. My presentation will be titled “Representing Change on the Israeli Kibbutz” and will discuss how the controversial evolution of the kibbutz movement has been depicted by filmmakers from different perspectives.
I’ve already watched four recent kibbutz movies—three documentaries and one fictional comedy-drama—and I plan to order two more recent docs and view them before the conference. Coincidentally, the producers of one of these films, titled Keeping the Kibbutz, have justlaunched a new website to promote their film, as they complete post-production. It includes a trailer that gives a sneak peek of some of the kibbutzniks and their experiences.
I’m especially intrigued by Keeping the Kibbutz, as it centers on Kfar Giladi, a community on the opposite side of the Huleh Valley from Shamir. The footage and still photos from the film capture the beauty of the hilly landscape. One of the filmmakers was born on the kibbutz (his mother was a kibbutzniks, his father a Welsh volunteer) but moved to the U.S. when he was three. The film documents his return to the kibbutz and the gulf that now exists between the utopia his parents described and the privatized arrangements of the 21st-century community. Judging by the trailer, it has a great soundtrack, too. Congrats to all involved at Eidolon Films for nearing the end of this project.
I especially liked the description of their filmmaking philosophy on their website: “Eidolon Films specializes in character-driven documentaries that inspire, engage and inform. The individuals and communities we film are not simply subjects, but collaborators in the telling of their stories.” That should be the motto of literary journalists and creative nonfiction writers as well.
