Dennis Fox’s Weblog

According to the statistics my website provider supplies, I’ve suddenly had hundreds more visitors than usual to an article of mine on anarchism and psychology. They’re coming from a site called StumbleUpon, which I gather lets websurfers let other people know what they find interesting.

Given the new visitors to my 1986 article, I figured I’d re-read it. Today it seems pretty wordy, but all in all not a bad summary of why I think anarchism makes sense.

There is one point I’d probably make differently today. Toward the end of piece, talking about re-organizing society along decentralized lines, I say this:

Perhaps examples such as the Israeli kibbutz system, a federated network of small, democratically managed collective communities with a history of both successes and failures, would be relevant as we begin our work.

The kibbutz collective and communal model still makes sense, but the past two decades have seen most kibbutzim themselves move away from it. Just last month, members of Degania, Israel’s first kibbutz, voted to privatize, four years short of its 100-year anniversary. As Haaretz explains,

Degania A is currently defined as a “renewal kibbutz,” that is, one in which members are paid differential salaries, and where apartments and property are distributed among members. Such kibbutzim also feature a “security network” intended to ensure a reasonable quality of life to economically weaker segments of the kibbutz population.

As I’ve noted before, although some kibbutzim I’ve visited retain a strong collective structure, most have privatized to one degree or another. My friends on these “renewed” kibbutzim are uniformly unhappy with these changes. I guess it should be no surprise that collectivism and communalism are hard to maintain generation after generation within a capitalist society’s relentless expansion. Still, that kibbutzim managed to sustain themselves for so long and produce generations of members more or less aligned with the socialist and humanist left should not be forgotten.

On the other hand, I know more today than I did decades ago about the seamier side of the story. The creation of small-scale socialism and egalitarianism was inextricably tied to Zionist insistence on Jewish self-labor rather than forging equality and solidarity with Arab labor, often on land from which Palestinian villagers had been expelled. Kibbutz socialism became indivisible from Zionist conquest and military might. The whole thing got very messy.

In 1968, at the peak of my teenage Zionist years, I co-founded a group of Americans that planned to create a new kibbutz. After a year or two of organizing, I proposed that our future kibbutz be open to non-Jewish members, including Israeli Arabs. My proposal drew only one other vote. That group soon merged with another, and eventually, several months after I quit, they founded Kibbutz Ktura (Ketura) in 1973.

Ktura, which I visited for the first time two years ago, today remains a “classic” kibbutz, its mostly English-speaking members still committed to socialist ideals. Its environmental studies school draws Arab students from several countries (and led to a lawsuit aiming to end an Israeli ban on Palestinian students). That’s all to the good. But Arab members? Not yet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Anarchism, Israel/Palestine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.