Kibbutzim
Starting in the early 20th century, Jewish settlers in Palestine established horizontally-managed communities called kibbutzim. The Romni group, founders of the first kibbutz in 1910, defined it as "a cooperative community without exploiters or exploited".[1] Within the movement, anarchist influences have existed uneasily aside an allegiance to Zionist settler-colonialism. To this day, the kibbutzim practice a remarkable degree of direct democracy and contribute a disproportionate part of their country's agricultural and industrial output.
The kibbutzim have put into practice the anarchist concepts of self-management, direct democracy and confederation. The first kibbutz, Degania, distinguished itself from the country's hierarchical farming settlements by using majority vote to make all managerial decisions. Unlike the privately-owned farms, Degania was profitable within its first year. By 1914, Jewish settlers had started 28 self-managed farms, with a total of 380 members, that operated on principles similar to Degania's. James Horrox wrote in A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement, "Every one of the [kibbutz] settlements provided a better return on capital invested than the market-driven farms of the First Aliyah immigrants."[2] Several times, kibbutzim have confederated in order to share resources and labor with each other. Today, 94 percent of Israel's kibbutzim belong to the Kibbutz Movement, which houses the TAKAM and Artzi confederations.
Noam Chomsky has said the early kibbutzim "came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction". Graham Purchase wrote that the kibbutz became "exactly the sort of modern communal village/small town life which Kropotkin had envisaged". Josef Trumpeldor, an influential kibbutz activist, described himself as "an anarcho-communist and a Zionist". [3]
Traditionally, the kibbutzim allowed no private property (or even many personal possessions). People pooled resources together, and members could take as much as they needed. An elected committee would rotate people's jobs, trying to assign each person an interesting variety of tasks and take into account their personal preferences. Children would live together and would only visit their parents for a few hours each day and on most of the day for Shabbat and holidays. Peer pressure and public opinion were used to prevent people from slacking off or violating communal rules.
Over the years, kibbutzim have some of their communal features. In the 1970s, they abandoned their policies of separating children from their parents. In the 1980s, many dining halls started charging for food. Now, many kibbutzim hire full-time managers. However, about 130 kibbutzim still continue to practice communal self-management. A 1999 report on Kibbutz Geffen found that the workplace's managers were elected and rotating, and had no coercive authority over workers. At some urban kibbutzim today, residents hold regular, outside jobs, but practice direct democratic, communal living.
More kibbutz members now work in industry than in agriculture (25 percent of adult residents work in industry, 15 percent in agriculture). Their main areas of industry are plastic and rubbers, metals and machines. The kibbutzim provide 40 percent of Israel's gross added value from agriculture. [4]
As described by Peter Gelderloos, the kibbutz movement's negligence to take an oppositional stance toward capitalism and Zionism led to it becoming largely compromised and contaminated with the hierarchical and racist norms of mainstream Israeli society. Moreover, the movement underestimated their members' desires for personal privacy:
After about a decade, the kibbutzim began to succumb to the pressures of the capitalist world that surrounded them. Although internally the kibbutzim were strikingly communal, they were never properly anti-capitalist; from the beginning, they attempted to exist as competitive producers within a capitalist economy. The need to compete in the economy, and thus to industrialize, encouraged a greater reliance on experts, while influence from the rest of society fostered consumerism.
At the same time, there was a negative reaction to the lack of privacy intentionally structured into the kibbutz — common showers, for example. The purpose of this lack of privacy was to engineer a more communal spirit. But because the designers of the kibbutz did not realize that privacy is as important to people’s well-being as social connectedness, kibbutz members began to feel stifled over time, and withdrew from the public life of the kibbutz, including their participation in decision-making.
Another vital lesson of the kibbutzim is that building utopian collectives must involve tireless struggle against contemporary authoritarian structures, or they will become part of those structures. The kibbutzim were founded on land seized by the Israeli state from Palestinians, against whom genocidal policies are still continuing today. The racism of the European founders allowed them to ignore the abuse inflicted on the previous inhabitants of what they saw as a promised land, much the same way religious pilgrims in North America plundered the indigenous to construct their new society. The Israeli state gained incredibly from the fact that nearly all their potential dissidents — including socialists and veterans of armed struggle against Nazism and colonialism — voluntarily sequestered themselves in escapist communes that contributed to the capitalist economy. If these utopians had used the kibbutz as a base to struggle against capitalism and colonialism in solidarity with the Palestinians while constructing the foundations of a communal society, history in the Middle East might have turned out differently. [5]
