The oldest kibbutz is going capitalist
The Guardian reports that Israel’s oldest kibbutz, Degania, has voted, 85% in favour, to abolish the traditional method of contributing all your earnings into a community fund and to replace it with a capitalist model whereby you keep your earnings but pay for services and pay taxes to contribute to those who are in need.
I don’t see this as a tragedy, or a victory. That is because of the almost unique nature of the kibbutz movement. They are purely voluntary. You don’t have to live there, you can opt to leave. That is the fundamental difference between the collectivist state and the kibbutz, the latter is voluntary for all concerned. So long as the kibbutz was founded legally (ie not on stolen land), which I believe is the case for most, if not all, and there’s no coercion involved in the decision to live there then liberals should celebrate them as people choosing to live as they wish, harming no one else.
The decision to abandon the common fund was taken democratically, but was part of a trend, electricity was already privately purchased (to cut costs- when you pay directly you use a resource more carefully) and communal meals had declined. This change however need not remove the sense of community which is central to the kibbutz, that can and probably will remain.
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February 20th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Just wondered whether your interest in this story was because you had experience of Kibbutz? I volunteered on a kibbutz in the mid-nineties and didn’t get much of a feeling of community..I have to admit!
February 21st, 2007 at 8:05 am
I’ve never had any experience of them, but from a liberal point of view I find them interesting. They’re a group of people voluntarily coming together to live in a different way to other people.
That’s something liberalism supports- people having the freedom to live as they like (subject to the usual provisos) even if they’re different from the usual social norms.
I’m sure they don’t always work like they’re meant to, but that’s part of liberalism too: the opportunity to try new things and discover whether they work or not - it obviously isn’t working fully for this Kibbutz so they’ve democratically modified it.
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:56 pm
The interesting thing here is the relation to a paper by the Libertarian political philosopher, Robert Nozick,’Who Would Choose Socialism’(collected in his book *Socratic Puzzles*). Nozick’s Libertarianism includes the idea that under a night watchman state we should all be free to choose which kind of varied basic community to live in. The Kibbutz from this point of view is an acceptable basic community, so long as it follows the general precondition of allowing members to leave. Nozick suggests that in Israel about 10% choose to live in a Kibbutz, or similar community, which makes a very strong argument against state administered socialism, though there is nothing wrong with people choosing to form Kibbutz style socialist communities on a voluntary basis. An Israeli friend told me 10% is an enormous over estimate since the pre-1948 period when it was important as a frontier institution for those seeking to found the state of Israel. No need for anti-socialist triumphalism, but this story surely confirms that humans mostly need market based economic incentives to live together in tolerable communities.