The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia
The Israeli collective farms known as kibbutzim, once the darlings of Israeli society, have fallen on hard times in this hyper-capitalist era, in part because of the decreasing importance of agriculture and the decline of Zionism even among Israelis. Even the most prosperous of the kibbutzim explored by Gavron, a veteran journalist (Israel After Begin), find it difficult to retain the children who have grown up there. Stock market investment, land development and salaries based on a member's worth to the collective (rather than equal pay for all)--all anathema to the movement's early 20th-century founders--are now common practice on some kibbutzim. Gavron provides historical and contemporary snapshots of a dozen kibbutzim. The early history he tells through the story of some of the kibbutz pioneers is fascinating, if not new, and offers a necessary basis for those new to the subject. The most illuminating parts of the book come in his interviews with contemporary kibbutz members--some of whom are very ready to admit the flaws of the system--and in his exploration of the effects of the communal child rearing that used to be a kibbutz hallmark. Gavron's recounting of the 1985 debt crisis that accelerated the movement's downward trend, however, will be confusing even to the knowledgeable, as is his description of the different types of financial perestroika that kibbutzim have undergone to maintain their viability. Gavron, who admits to a fondness for the kibbutz, states in his conclusion that the death knell is arriving for many of the collectives, once dubbed the experiment that didn't fail. As one member puts it, "It is a painful process. There is a feeling of loss, of uncertainty. No one knows where it will end." (May) --Publishers WeeklyThe kibbutz, or agricultural and light industrial commune, was one of Israel's chief instruments of state-building. Initiated in 1910 as a socialist experiment in cooperative action, it provided work for newcomers, promoted their settlement in inland areas of Palestine, and afforded a sense of purpose and solidarity. At the time of statehood, Israel's national borders were largely determined by the location of the most distant kibbutzim, and, writes journalist Daniel Gavron, the kibbutz movement "held a unique position of prestige, providing many of the nation's best military commanders, as well as a third of its government."
Over the last half century, Gavron argues, and especially since the 1970s, the kibbutzim have lost some of their utopian sensibility. For example, where before each kibbutz worker held an equal share of the commune's holdings, there are now differentials in income, and decades of inflation and borrowing compromised the financial integrity of several of the most important communities. Many Israelis consider kibbutzim to be wonderful places for children and the elderly, but not for career-minded workers in the prime of life.
All that notwithstanding, the kibbutz continues to play an important role in Israeli life, Gavron writes, producing some 40 percent of the country's crops and about 10 percent of its manufactured goods. His study of this remarkable, and in the main successful, experiment is a useful contribution to Israeli history. --Gregory McNameeRelated:The Death of Gentle Socialism
By Eric Maroney on October 20, 2008
The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia makes for interesting reading during a time when world capitalism as we know it, seemingly vindicated by its victory from state controlled economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Block in the late 80's and early 90's, is tanking.
Gavron's work explores what was considered the most successful and long lasting enterprise in collective living, the numerous kibbutzim established in Palestine and the State of Israel beginning in the late nineteenth century. During the mid-to late 1980s the kibbutz movement, in general, suffered from the same extreme malaise and crisis of ideology which brought down the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block. However the death of the kibbutzim is a strange cousin to these larger trends, since they were voluntary, democratic entities. People were not forced to forgo private property and live collectively. Living on a kibbutz was an individual choice.
Yet the crisis came anyway, and this work details the response of various kibbutzim to the sudden disenchantment of Israelis from the collective form of life. Privatization to varying degrees was adopted by the movement, essentially transforming the socialist structures of the kibbutz into private enterprises of varying styles and degrees.
Gavron points out that the kibbutz set out to create a new human being, one who put the group first and the individual last. In many ways, this enterprise failed. Yet we suddenly live in a world today where privatization has finally trampled over its limitations, yet there is no alternative collective life any longer. Gavron's work, it seems, is timely reading. What can we look to now? -Amazon comment
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