"Kibbutz" is the Hebrew name of a communal settlement based on the principle of a shared home for a large number of individuals and families. The first kibbutz was founded in 1910, and by 1991 there were 270 legally recognized kibbutzim (plural form), with a total population of 129,300. Most individual kibbutzim have a population of 300 to 600 persons, though the largest have well over a thousand.
The communal dining hall is the center of communal life and symbolizes the predominance of communal consumption. All buildings and means of production are communally owned, and all economic activities are communally operated. Most members work within the communal territory, and most of the work is done by the kibbutz members themselves both for reasons of principle and efficiency. Labor is regarded as having a value of its own that cannot be translated into sums of money. Members do not receive wages. They engage in the economic functions of the kibbutz as participant-owners for whom wage incentives are not required in order to achieve a high standard of efficiency. All communal consumption is also liberated from market conditions, just as it is in any private home. For more individual needs and wants, those based on private choice, members receive an annual personal budget set by decision of the General Assembly of the kibbutz each year on an egalitarian basis.
Kibbutzim began primarily as agricultural settlements and only at a later stage entered into large-scale industrialization and other economic activities ranging from tourism to legal offices. In the early 1990's, agriculture continued to be an important factor in the kibbutz economy, and contributed more than on-third if the country's total agricultural produce; but industry had meanwhile expanded rapidly and came to contribute a larger direct share of gross kibbutz income. From another point of view, though, agriculture has remained dominant, since food-processing and manufacture of agricultural equipment account for me than half of total kibbutz industrial sales.
By 1991, kibbutz industrial accounted for 7% of Israel's total industrial sales, and for 9% of its industrial exports (excluding diamonds). These figures become more meaningful when placed against the weight of the kibbutz, which in 1991 was only 2.6% of total Israeli population.
The above figures are one indication of the efficiency and high productivity that characterize the kibbutz economy. They lead inevitably to the question of whether the socioeconomic system of the kibbutz could be copied in a different social, economic, political, and cultural context. The question is particularly relevant for those countries where improved levels of productivity in agriculture and industry are urgently needed, and at the same time cultural tradition facilitates the adoption of communal consumption. Experience has taught that success in a kibbutz requires a high degree of personal commitment on the part of its membership to the communal way of life. That means developing an ideology capable of creating that measure of personal commitment to a vision until achievement of concrete results is able to produce its own justification.
Historically, the kibbutz developed as a part of Zionism, which provided strong ideological support for the commitment of members who saw in the kibbutz an efficient means for achieving the Zionist goal of regrouping the Jewish people in their traditional homeland. Another contributing factor was strong motivation for building a new and better way of life in the communitarian tradition, something which has been cultivated with much idealistic intensity in the youth movements. Any attempt to build kibbutzim elsewhere would require a comparable ideological motivation of high intensity.
The kibbutz moment is a revolutionary movement that carries several important socioeconomic messages for the 21st century. In an important sense, it is also a kind of "laboratory" for testing alternative socioeconomic practices. One important lesson from kibbutz experience is that labor, when liberated from market conditions by turning the worker into a participant-owner, becomes more meaningful and humane. It is also more efficient and reaches higher levels of productivity. Another important lesson is that flexible communal consumption, which allows for private needs and personal choice, is a better way of coping with the culture of consumerism cultivated by the expanding world market.
Altogether, the kibbutz has emerged as a new household model based on a community of families and comrades, who combine their skills and strengths in order to build a qualitatively and morally better way of life. It contrasts with contemporary market society in important ways: (1) the kibbutz encourages family members to stay together throughout the life-cycle, in contrast to private households where the elderly are usually left to fend for themselves and the young fail to derive adequate benefit from the experience of their parents; (2) kibbutz life is centered on people who are real and immediate, and not on abstractions such as prices and symbols of achievement; (3) the kibbutz is based on sharing and mutual help, and not on competition or the dominance of self-interest. In short, the kibbutz is based on the traditional values of the home and its distributive economy, and offers an alternative to the conflict of interests and resulting injustice which marks the exchange economy of contemporary local and international markets.
For a time, an impression was formed on the part of some members within, and some observers without, as though the family had only a minor role in the kibbutz. Actually, the kibbutz of today is one of the most "familial" societies in the world, and one of the few places where families of three and four generations continue to live together in the same household. Much attention is given in this monograph to the place of the family, partly because it is so important in itself and partly in order to set the record straight. That is one axis of the discussion. The other is concerned with the kibbutz as a shared household.
The past generation has seen the dynamic emergence of household economics as a respected field if inquiry, pulling together economists and a wide range of social scientists in what is developing as a new orientation of socioeconomics. The rise of consumerism as a dominant cultural trait of the expanding world market economy has given added importance to the household budget, with all its consequences. A significant change has come about with the understanding that households and families are not necessarily congruent. More and more households are being formed in post-industrial societies by domestic groups that are not families in the traditional sense of kinship.
Part of the new development has been a theory convenient for an exchange economy and according to which individuals build their lies on rational choices. That theory does not conform to one of the most important features of the emerging world market, which is the fact that billions of dollars are spent each year on advertising and other means of arousing demand for specific products, with the deliberate objective of producing irrational choices among consumers. In more affluent societies, professional marketing is devoted to creating wants where their are not existential needs.
Professional marketing experts have found that the shortest path to irrational choice is the cultivation of personal choice and individual consumption responding to real or presumed psychological needs. At the same time, there has been a persistent and unrelenting move in the other direction toward greater collective consumption in accordance with genuine social needs. Public services such as education, hospitals, police and fire departments, public parks and gardens, public transportation and the important communal care of the needy through unemployment compensation, old age pensions, municipal social welfare departments, etc., are only a part of the picture. All of them represent shared use of public facilities and resources.
In addition, there is the intriguing phenomenon of increasing demand for participation in mass events where the experience shared with many other persons is a vital element in attaining enjoyment, or some kind of satisfaction, from the event. In itself, participation in crowds is not a new phenomenon. Large-scale attendance at athletic events or religious festivals has been an important part of social activities in virtually all cultures of the world, and has for the most part demonstrated group solidarity along recognized and institutionalized lines. The now legendary musical festival at Woodstock, however, marked a profound and important change in two significant ways. First of all, the size of the crowd and the duration of the event were without precedent in advanced market societies. Secondly, identification with the music and its message indicated massive psychological needs that have not yet been defined fully, but are influencing social behavior. It is not accidental that the "rock" music associated with Woodstock, with its deep message of protest, has caught on in all parts of the world where rapid urbanization and faltering economic development, political incompetency, and the lingering menace of mass destruction from non-conventional weapons, have made anxiety a universal cultural trait.
Public response has not been restricted to music. There has been an extraordinary increase in the number of persons participating in political demonstrations and environmental protests. Then too, there is the relatively new phenomenon of mass participation in events filmed and shown simultaneously on television screens throughout the world in what are termed "live" programs, where viewers in the hundreds of millions share the same experience at the same time, and thereby also form a new kind if shared identity. The Olympic Games as Barcelona provided an unusually clear example of the new world culture based on participation of persons from all continents performing their roles according to an agreed set of rules, and brought into homes everywhere by a world communications network. The basic functional similarity between the Olympic Games and the emerging world market system is too clear to need further comment.
Whatever explanations may be offered, the fact of the matter is that there are too kinds of consumerism competing within the contemporary market culture, and they point in different directions. One moves toward greater individuation and personal choice, more privacy, and larger personal space. That trend is accompanied by weakening of the family group and its traditional pattern of shared living. The other trend is toward greater participation in group activities, more shared consumption, satisfaction of an inherent need for communication with other human beings, and strengthened self-identity through involvement in shared life with others. Together, they are creating a new world culture characterized by internal contradictions on a massive scale between rational and irrational choices.
The kibbutz is very much a part of that new world culture, and suffers from the same internal contradictions. Much of the recent "crisis" has been concerned with problems arising out of contradictions inherent in the attempts to meet rational and irrational choices within a common framework of shared consumption. Most of the criticism expressed in recent years ha been aimed at failures in the functioning of the kibbutz household, and has been concerned with issues of consumerism. Greater demand for personal choices, and particularly those that are irrational, has made the allocation of household resources more difficult at a time when financial problems have compelled a reduction in the resources available for consumption.
The way in which the kibbutz copes with this problem, and the solutions it works out for combining greater individual consumption within a more flexible framework of shared consumption, are issues of immense importance for the future course of the emerging world market and its accompanying culture of consumerism. While the kibbutz grew out of specific historical conditions in the past, it is now an alternative way of life that is in the forefront of contemporary socioeconomic development. So far, it has had remarkable success in resolving problems through creative responses within concrete situations, but there have also been failures along the way and many mistakes made. This monograph is a modest attempt to bring some of the lessons from kibbutz experience to a wider public.
The present kibbutz population is divided into four organizational groups, each of which considers itself an independent movement within the overall framework commonly referred to as the "kibbutz movement". Largest among the four is the United Kibbutz Movement, usually called TAKAM according to its Hebrew acronym. It includes 61% of total kibbutz population in 166 kibbutzim. Next in size is the Kibbutz Artzi, with 32% of total kibbutz population in 85 kibbutzim. Much smaller are the two religious groups; the Kibbutz Dati with 6% of total kibbutz population in 17 kibbutzim, and Poeley Agudat Israel with 1% of total kibbutz population in 2 kibbutzim.
Kibbutz Maayan Zvi, November 1992