A Debate: The Kibbutz: Utopia in. Crisis

...The book is uncluttered with the usual jargon, and its concreteness balances its theoretical probing...

...It is men who are not worthy...

...The Kibbutz pioneers acted out what most of the early Zionist settlers identified with or felt but, for one reason or another, were incapable of doing...

...The dissatisfaction of the women throws into question fundamental Kibbutz assumptions and institutions...

...266 pages...

...But, as Spiro states in the most significant section of his book, the Kibbutz crisis is also internal...

...KIBBUTZ-VENTURE IN UTOPIA, by Melford E. Spiro...

...And he sees the Marxism of the Kibbutz as a new, transcendental religion replacing the orthodox Judaism of the European past...

...What does seem crucial with reference to the Sabra is the type of personality structure emerging from the collective method of child rearing...

...As the adult members grow older, as asceticism declines in attractiveness, and as the Kibbutz increases its relative solvency, more funds are expended on consumer goods and creature comforts...

...There are, also, objective elements in the Kibbutz crisis, to which the community may not be able to adjust, while maintaining its traditional form...

...In the meantime, driven by the cruel imperatives of survival, Israel is forced to be too many things to too many men...

...Whether it will remain acceptable, even when no longer necessary, depends, of course, upon the redefinition of objectives and loyalties that seems bound to occur within the State after the Zionist chrysalis is, for all practical purposes, fully shed...

...The committed Kibbutznik regards them as a betrayal of his original vision, as the beginning of the end...

...1956...

...If they take the logical step, then they are in danger of being converted into managerial cooperatives, in effect, internal capitalist enterprises...

...It is unlikely," he states, "that the [Sabras] are the idealistic rebels their parents were...

...it is characteristic of the social form of the Kibbutz itself...

...The dissolution of these institutions would symbolize the exhaustion of the original "revolutionary" drive out of which, in conjunction with pioneer material conditions, the collective form developed...

...Though the political allegiances of the Kibbutzim range from Center to Left, including two orthodox religious groupings but excluding the Communists, their basic institutional forms are almost identical...

...However, we would have appreciated more information on some of the external aspects of this crisis...

...but unless one loves them, it is all but impossible to be in constant interaction with them...

...Another problem is relevant here...

...socialists are told that Israel is a unique pathway to Utopia...

...Indeed, as indicated below, a good proportion of the tensions in the Kibbutz, although they tend to be rationalized in political and ideological terms, are generic to the social form itself...

...It seemed not to occur to him that a permanently viable society could not be built in so artificial a fashion...

...In other words, the Kibbutz tends toward a public exploitation of the personality, rather than its social encouragement, and this is the result of what may be termed "over-collectivization...

...even the privacy which most people enjoy at meals or in the shower is impossible...

...Whatever else can be said about it, it is a fait accompli of heroic dimensions, to which the State itself bears witness...

...Indeed, a stringent economic analysis of the ownership structure of the Kibbutz would, I believe, reveal that a variety of organizations, and even some individuals, hold equity of one type or another, but that the average Kibbutznik simply exchanges labor for services while in residence...

...Yet it was this vision of the Kibbutz as a new society that not only spurred its members but engaged the attention of people throughout the world to whom Zionism was neither a central issue nor a personal commitment...

...And further, "the chaverim are willing to share property and skills, but many of them resent the sharing of experiences, and this has been a major source of tension in the Kibbutz, and an obstacle to brotherhood...

...Above all, perhaps, they miss the emoI39 tional interaction and fulfilling sense of responsibility connected with the rearing of their own children...

...The former function of the Kibbutz, national-economic and military, need not detain us...

...The latter function, in so far as its larger socialist implications are concerned, always was and remains problematic...

...Involved here is the whole network of communal dining hall, communal child care, minimal privacy, and truncated family life, through which the women have not found the emancipation they envisioned...

...This is not a new dilemma, for the Kibbutzim were never vehicles for the absorption of mass immigration, although the average Kibbutz probably trained or oriented at least three times the number of people it permanently settled...

...but they were none of these to begin with...

...What we were really looking for was Man...

...And not only socialism, but the ultimate good society...

...This means that the abandonment of any single key institution would signify the extinction of the Kibbutz as Kibbutz...

...In the poignant words of one of his informants, "...above all, we have not succeeded in discovering Man...

...For example, the surrender of the communal dining hall, even if financially feasible, would instantly dissolve the collective structure, as would the abandonment of the collective method of child rearing, and so on...

...Later, of course, the institutions which crystallized out of these sometimes hardly conscious motivations were rationalized in Marxist, Freudian, or ultimate humanist terms...

...And it is this impossibility which the Kibbutz, in effect, imposes on its members by its values of group dynamics and its consequent institutions of communal living...

...Israel is a tiny, unformed country of deceptive surfaces and complex roots...

...ALTHOUGH OTHER ASPECTS of the external crisis of the Kibbutz cannot be pursued in detail here, they can perhaps be summed up in the words of the manager of a commercial bank in Jerusalem that had made extensive loans to the collectives: "Kibbutz socialism is the kind we capitalists like...

...But it is also the reason why Kibbutz members were characterized as culture heroes by the Yishuv, the basic, predominantly Eastern European population of Israel...

...It is, therefore, evident that the energies discharged by the left wing Kibbutzim, particularly by the Marxist oriented, in attempting to fix the final details of the ultimate commune, that is, in focusing on the specialized form, weakens their revolutionary sting...

...These doctrines therefore have a way of dissolving into mere utopian play...

...And when they grow older, we will need still more...

...There is an Israeli idiom...

...Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass...

...He promises a later study of the Sabras (the native born generation) and their kibbutz, in order to determine what viability this highly specialized society may have after, as he puts it, following Weber and Mannheim, the "routinization of charisma" has set in and the "utopia of the fathers has become the ideology of the sons...

...Rationally considered, however, it probably functions as an alternative value system for people perceptive enough to recognize the utopian limitations of the Kibbutz as Kibbutz yet sophisticated enough to ask the question, "Is Zionism enough...

...The plain fact is that today many, probably the majority, of Kibbutzim have more land and resources than they can possibly exploit, given the size and nature of their regular labor forces...

...Nor is there any necessary connection between the categories of bourgeois and private, or collective and socialist in the sense that most Kibbutznikim make these correlations Kibbutz meanings, institutions, values, and achievements are unique, they arose in a peculiar and unprecedented historic context, and they cannot be generalized beyond it...

...Many leaders of the movement fight a desperate rearguard action against modifications in the classic form or ideology, while refusing to entertain the possibility that the form itself may be in crisis...

...I would not place the same emphasis on Sabra "motivation" that Spiro does...

...This was necessary and acceptable during the pioneer phase of development, when the national and socialist roles of the collectives tended to fuse, and when, in any case, manual labor was a moral imperative, a desire, an atonement, an end in itself, and not merely an objective function...

...Capitalists are encouraged to invest under quite favorable conditions...

...This is certainly the reason why the Kibbutzim have failed to attract new immigrants, whether of Eastern or Western origin, in significant numbers...

...Be that as it may, Spiro, who cannot be accused of Marxist inclinations, inadvertently helps reveal the basic contradiction inherent in an agrarian commune, "an island in a (predominantly) capitalist sea," with a restricted membership, which is dependent for its very existence on non-socialist sources of support yet poses as the spearhead of revolutionary social change in Israel...

...The author's parting contention is that the survival of the Kibbutz depends upon the degree to which the native-born children feel motivated to maintain its unique structure, rather than merely "cognitively" to accept its values...

...What was not understood here was that the very institutions of the Kibbutz which qualified it for its national role simultaneously served as channels for the discharge of the utopian energies of the devoted Kibbutznik...

...External factors aside, the unique and specialized internal structure, that very network of institutions which defined the Kibbutz and gave it the stature of a dramatic social experiment, is today being called into serious question...

...The Israeli Kibbutzim are divided into three major, and two inconsequential Federations, with a total membership of seventy thousand, comprising about 4½ per cent of the total population of the country, and one quarter of the agricultural population...

...It is, and the point cannot be emphasized strongly enough, a highly specialized society, satisfying the historically created needs, both objective and subjective, of a Jewish generation in transition from the Shtetl or its equivalent, to Statehood...

...Thus we find that there is a strong tendency for the leaders to identify themselves with the youth, while estranging themselves from the more experienced mass of older members...

...It . is my conviction that most Kibbutz members are, today, aware of this...

...That is to say, the radically collectivized form of the Kibbutz can be undertood as a necessary adaptation to the tasks of pioneering a dangerous and desolate land with little capital and less experience...

...They have become domestically specialized on a community wide basis, while losing the more diversified skills that a woman usually develops...

...In doing so, they cannot avoid abusing the cardinal principle of the Kibbutz, known as avoda atzmit (self, as opposed to wage, labor) . They thus cease to exist as Kibbutzim...

...Communal dining halls, collective methods of rearing children, the banishment of money, and so on, have little or no relevance to realistic definitions or imperatives of socialism...

...This means that they are backed into the position of hiring labor...

...Put another way, the Kibbutz abuses the spirit of cooperation by attempting to embody love institutionally, by insisting, as it were, that people can and must tap new dimensions of moral experience through the mechanical expedient of its group structure...

...This is an issue of critical importance, not only for the Kibbutz, whether or not its precise form is perpetuated, but also for the light it will certainly cast on the psychodynamics of human growth...

...Now none of this would seem very significant to a hard headed capitalist or socialist with larger ends realistically in mind, but within the intimate contexture of the Kibbutz it has a shattering effect, precisely because the Kibbutz, in its classic form, has traditionally been viewed as an end in itself...

...But meanwhile the Kibbutz as both institution and idea is in deep and permanent crisis...

...Yet they also supplied the elan, without which the Kibbutz could hardly have survived, save as a work camp, no matter what the objec tive needs of Zionist colonization...

...Since Israel has not yet discovered her identity, the danger is that one will be manufactured for her after the image, and in accordance with the needs, of Western bourgeois society...

...Spiro informs us at the outset that we are to regard his monograph as a preliminary study, dealing with the Kibbutz as it has been established and experienced by the older generation of pioneer settlers...

...Simultaneously, Israel is envisioned as a messianic Zionist-Jewish movement, leading all people everywhere, by example, into the promised land...

...He outlines the dual perspective in which the community must be seen in order to be understood: as a dedicated colonization instrument of the national Zionist undertaking, and as an arena within which the utopian motives of the founders were acted out...

...Indeed the few Kibbutzim that operate light industrial establishments seem to have made this transition...

...But if, on the other hand, they prohibit hired labor, they fail to justify themselves economically within the State structure...

...This commitment to the classic form of the Kibbutz has still another aspect, which Spiro does not touch upon...

...To the potential immigrant, Israel is described as a place where a disturbed Jewish identity can be "normalized" into a sound and healthy national experience of the self, that is to say, where Jews, after shedding the soiled garments of the Galut, can step forth like other people as a recognized nation among the nations...

...As Spiro sums up this intricate and pressing problem, "the woman feels frustrated and insecure [in] her maternal and sexual roles, [in addition] to her economic one...

...The survival of the Kibbutzim depends upon the continuous recruitment of young idealists...

...It is for this reason, apparently, that even minor changes in Kibbutz structure are accompanied by such agony...

...And the fact that today most kinds of hired labor are cheaper to support than most members aggravates the problem...

...Indeed, the sense of failure in personal relations, the belief that the "New Man" has not been created, is, as Spiro indicates, a subjective aspect of the crisis in the Kibbutz...

...The membership, par ticularly the leaders of the movement, recognize that Kibbutz institutions operate with unusual rigidity...

...PERHAPS THE cRisis is best epitomized by what Spiro properly calls "the problem of the women...

...Since Israel does not yet know herself, how can she be known...

...As I have indicated, the highly specialized form of the Kibbutz has failed to attract new members...

...As Spiro points out, the "Marxist," actually Stalinist, orientation of his Kibbutz was extraordinarily rigid and mechanical...

...On the other hand, although the data have not yet been analyzed, "certain aspects of Sabra character are entirely consistent with Kibbutz culture so that, presumably, they would be motivated to perpetuate it...

...It is to Spiro's credit that he concludes his book with a frank and perceptive exposition of the crisis through which the entire Kibbutz movement is now struggling...

...It is also evident that the Marxist or more generalized left wing doctrines of the majority of Kibbutzim are super-impositions on an institutional form which arose for reasons having little to do with such ideologies...

...This reaction had many of the characteristics of an adolescent rebellion, subjectively perceived as a social revolution of universal significance...

...That is, there exists no necessary connection between the fundamental form of the Kibbutz and its political allegiance...

...THE ABOVE STRICTURES apply to all the Kibbutzim, and perhaps even more pertinently to the "Marxist" Kibbutzim affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair, one of whose member communities served as the locus of Spiro's field work...

...What Spiro does not tell us is that the manifest Marxist goals of the Hashomer Hatzair Kibbutzim, their Stalinism aside, are blocked not only by their position vis a vis Israel as a whole, but are simply irrelevant to their internal social organization...

...When the evidence is all in, it should prove instructive indeed...

...Relative to the country at large, they are shrinking rather than expanding, whereas cooperative villages (Moshavei Ovdim) are proliferating rapidly...

...This pre-occupation also leads to ideological storms whose intensity is increased by the narrowness of their circumference, even when the issues in controversy are objectively unimportant or when the distance between the disputants, as in recent political schisms, does not justify the economic cost or personal tensions involved...

...We can, therefore, congratulate Professor Melford Spiro for his refreshingly clear and competent "anthropological study" of a Kibbutz, the collective settlement which was both the quintessence of the Labor Zionist revolt and an anchor of the emerging State structure.* Basing himself on participant observation, and the case method, Spiro has succeeded in drawing an unusually accurate portrait of Kibbutz life, informed by interpretations that are often sound and convincing...

...Although psychoanalytic interpretations of political ideology are always suspect and usually irrelevant, the curious role played by this "Marxism-Stalinism" within the context of the left wing Kibbutzim 'does have a familiar Freudian ring...

...In Spiro's words, "It is all but impossible for the average chaver [member] to enjoy more than a few moments of solitude...

...In short, Israel presents so many faces to a Western world terribly engaged with the Jew as symbol, and is the target of so many projections that what Israel is lies half-buried under the weight of what Israel must be, ought to be, can be, will be, and was...

...It is therefore possible that the socialist interests of the members would wither away, a familiar phenomenon in communal experiments, since they had, after all, experienced what they perceived as the ultimate commune and found it insupportable...

...As the Kibbutznikim often say, "The Kibbutz, as a social form, is excellent...

...But the fierce commitment to the Kibbutz as Kibbutz, the ultimate rather than merely utilitarian valuation of its particular institutions, can only be comprehended in terms of an over-reaction of the old settlers against what they experienced as and labeled "petty bourgeois" Jewish life in Eastern Europe...

...Indeed, he interprets this Stalinism as, in effect, a superego, that is, as a "good" father image substituting for the "bad" Jewish fathers whom the veteran settlers rejected...

...The psychological results of such action could be disastrous, precisely because the Kibbutz has identified socialism with such limited institutions...

...An inevitable process of internal economic differentiation sets in, of "exploitation," and this is exacerbated by the private goods that some members procure from friends and relatives...

...As Murray Weingarten points out in his straightforward memoir, Life in a Kibbutz, Marxist and Kibbutz purposes are divergent...

...But a culture remains to be created in the teeth of, among other things, a massive diffusion of money, machines, and modes of thinking from Western urban society...

...But the commitment to the classic collective form is still so strong, so symbolic of the revolt of the older members against "petty bourgeois" Jewish life in the Shtetl, and so closely identified with "ultimate socialism" that most members insist that the institutions have revealed the inadequacies of Man, rather than vice-versa...

...The rejection of the nuclear family unit, the compulsive, quasi-religious idealization of manual labor, the contempt for urban life, the search for a new collective identity seen in necessary opposition to the individual as such, the asceticism, the elitism, above all, the conception of the Jews, that is, of themselves, as parasites, whose very natures had to he cleansed and whose destiny it was to create a new generation sprung from the soil of Palestine as superior but "normalized" men—all of these motivations were symptomatic of a romantic and cultistic rebellion...

...Vested interest is involved here, for should the Kibbutz change drastically, many of the present leaders would lose their positions of prestige, but perhaps more significantly, they would be faced with the problem of redefining socialism both in terms of the internal structure of the Kibbutz and with reference to the nation as a whole...

...for example, the symptomatic problem of hired labor...

...For the Kibbutz was not a rationally planned society, whose furniture merely needs some detailed re-arrangement in order to reveal to us the layout of the future...

...Let the enthusiasts beware...

...It is pertinent that, when I was in Israel, one prominent leader of the Movement told me, with unusual candor, "It seems that as people grow older, they lose their enthusiasm for the Kibbutz way...

...When a member leaves the collective, it is usually the opinion of his wife that proves decisive...

...As some chaverim observed, it is entirely possible to cooperate with other people even when one does not love them...

...This means that a larger portion of the "surplus value" accruing from the labor of certain categories of the membership, and from hired labor, where it exists, is diverted to the benefit of other members...

...or Israel is represented as the bridge between East and West, a magic link in time and space uniting disparate cultures into a new synthesis...

...QUITE PROPERLY, Spiro views the Kibbutz as the organic lifeexpression of the pioneer settlers...

...Spiro's most disturbing observation, with which I agree, concerns the general air of disillusionment and frustration pervading Kibbutz life today...

...But if it is difficult to determine whether Spiro's criticism of the Marxist orientation of the Hashomer Hatzair Kibbutzim is to be taken as a criticism of Marxism per se or as an analysis of the inappropriateness of Marxism in a Kibbutz context, it is at least clear that his identification of the older settlers as a "class-conscious proletariat par excellence" is misplaced...

...He writes: "...the basic causes for the crisis are to be found within [the Kibbutz], and may be attributed to the social structure, the values of the Kibbutz, and the changing psychology of its members...