The changing kibbutz
The basic kibbutz slogan "to each according to his needs, from each according to his
means" expresses a belief that no person is worth more than another. This is a moral
concept that transcends local market values. A physically stronger person may be better
at shifting rocks, a quick person better at assembling bicycles, a clever person at solving
problems and apparently a sufferer from ADD may have better computer skills; so purely
economic measures of a person’s worth are only a matter of time and place, not absolute.
From 1909 on, settlements were established which lived according to this principle. On
these kibbutzim, each member gave his maximum, both at work and in service to the
community outside working hours, and in return all his needs were supplied directly by
the kibbutz - health, housing, clothes, education (for children and adults), food, leisure
activities and a hundred and one other needs that vary from person to person. On top of
this, the member was given a small allowance as pocket money, to go on holidays or
spend as he thought fit. If you needed a shirt, you asked for one, if you needed soap or
a comb, you went to the kibbutz store and got them. If your child had a birthday, you
were given a sum of money to buy a present. If you didn't need a thing, you didn't get it.
The kibbutz assembly voted budgets for all these items once a year, calculated at the
same sum for every member, but only distributed according to need. At this stage, every
member had an itemised annual budget, and if he didn't need all his clothes budget, for
instance, the left-over money stayed in the communal purse. Difficulties arose: for
example, someone with a flair for carpentry might built himself a shelf unit, which
nobody else had. The simple solution to this inequality was that the kibbutz did not
supply him with one when it got round to supplying them to members in general.
Conformity of behavior was echoed in a very high degree of material equality. This was
relatively easy to achieve, as long as the standard of living was only basic and choices in
consumer goods very limited. The system worked fairly well, for 40 years or more, until
the weaknesses inherent in it - waste, exploitation of the system by individuals and
especially a breakdown in the consensus of what constituted a need - led to gradual
change. It was recognised that, beyond the most basic necessities of life, individual
choice was an inseparable part of needs.
Members argued that they might prefer a better soap and prefer to put up with (say)
a cheaper toothpaste instead. A couple might want a second armchair, instead of a
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proper bookshelf to replace the planks they were using. Over the next 40 years, more
and more of the "personal" budgets were credited to the member to do with what he
liked, until most kibbutzim instituted the "inclusive budget" of as many items as could
reasonably be given to the members individually without destroying the concept of
"equality". The cigarette allowance can serve as a model of the process. Smokers were
supplied with as many cigarettes as they needed, until they demanded to be allowed
fewer but better cigarettes than those the kibbutz supplied (which were pretty awful).
The implication of this demand is that there is an element of choice in how many
cigarettes the smoker needed. As a result, the concept “need” underwent a change, from
the object itself to its cash value. Within a few years, cigarettes were taken off the list of
items supplied from the common purse, solely to those who needed them. Besides, by
this time smoking was increasingly seen an anti-social activity.
The concept of need became virtually irrelevant to the distribution of resources,
except in. the matters of education, health, food, housing and services (laundry,
plumbing, carpentry & electrical repairs and installation, administration). There were still
some special allowances given only to people who needed them, such as presents for
children, or an extra clothing allowance for people whose jobs involved wearing "good"
clothes to work, or alimony (if your ex-wife left the kibbutz and lived in town). Two late
steps in this growing process were when our houses were metered and we were given an
individual electricity budget, to save on or overspend, as we saw fit, and later still,
getting an equal budget for food, and paying for what we eat, cafeteria style.
This phase began to put identical distribution above equal satisfaction. Everyone’s
basic needs were taken for granted, by this time, and what had previously been thought
of as luxuries became standard. The question of how to measure both needs and equality
had become insoluble. They were replaced by the concept “freedom of choice”, and
cash value became the only viable criterion. My favourite example is when TV sets were
given out: one couple demanded - and got - a parrot, instead. It became plain, however,
that the demand for consumer goods far outstripped the ability of the kibbutz to supply
them. Refrigerators, fans, TV sets and air conditioners were distributed to all, but
carpets, stereos, food processors, cookers, video recorders, cameras, CD players,
microwave ovens and PCs were some of the items that, over the years, had either to be
bought from an personal allowance that was never enough to cover them, or acquired as
presents. What is more, when they wore out, the kibbutz did not replace them - as it
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replaced broken electric kettles - because they were never a part of the “norm” of
household appliances for which the community was responsible. This official “norm”, a
concept bound up with equality, became outdated to the point where it was meaningless.
A third phase has recently started. Over the last few years, there has been a strong
demand for the member's individual contribution to the kibbutz to be recognised
materially. Greater effort (longer hours and greater responsibility) should be rewarded
with higher earnings. What we decided was to make a proportion of the member's
income reflect these. Having no other yardstick to estimate members' cash value to the
community, we chose to assess it by market value. (I think that's a crashing mistake,
since free market wage scales are absolutely mad. I work as a science editor, in an airconditioned office, on a comfortable chair, occasionally pecking at my computer or redinking bad English between coffee breaks, while the field worker breaks his back,
weeding in the sun, and he only gets paid half of what I do). Each of us gets 20% of his
assessed wage assigned to him. Another differential item is seniority: you get a little
more according to how long you've been here. (I'm in a minority of one on the kibbutz in
thinking this is nonsense). Members of the kibbutz are not credited with an annual
budget any more, but receive a monthly wage that consists of (a) a basic minimum rate;
(b) a differential wage (20% of their assessed wages); (c) a seniority allowance (about
5% of the total). There are special arrangements for long-term sickness and for
pensioners. A member who earns money by moonlighting receives a proportion of the
income into his pocket. (For instance, if I had made any money out of a novel I
published, I would be credited with half of it). Now that the principle of adjusted equal
income has been breached, it is very likely that the differential proportion of our salary
will increase within a few years, and that ten years from now, the system will have
evolved into a combination of free market earnings, mitigated by an internal welfare
system. A municipal tax will cover welfare and communal expenditure.
Kibbutzim were typically founded by groups of 30 - 80 people which were formed in
youth movements in this country or abroad. These groups were very homogenous in age
and (naturally) aims, and before settling the land assigned to them, members of the group
would spend a period of training on an already settled kibbutz or on training farms
abroad, apart from already knowing each other well from “the Movement”. (There were
and are quite a number of such youth movements, with different ideological slants, but
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they all referred to themselves as “the Movement”). This led to a very strong sense of
group solidarity. A kibbutz might be founded by two such groups, or by one which was
later reinforced by another and more succeeding groups. The attrition rate was high,
because kibbutz life made heavy demands on the individual.
One of the things that characterised the kibbutz was that the individual willingly
subordinated himself to the community as a whole. Given a democracy that was - and
still is - more highly developed than anywhere else in the world, the member worked
where he was told to work, filled any post or on any committee he was elected to, and
accepted every decision of the majority, however it affected him personally. Of course,
the community made efforts to take the individual’s needs and ability into account, but
the needs of the kibbutz came first. The kibbutz has no laws (except the laws of the
country) or law enforcers, except public opinion. This worked, because within the
original groups, consensus was very strong. The only sanction the kibbutz has against
members who disobey customs or decisions is to expel them, and this is very rarely done.
Over the 37 years I have lived on my kibbutz, we have only ever expelled two members:
one (a gambling addict) broke into the factory’s safe and stole the money, the other grew
marijuana. In general, mind you, crime is rare and limited to youngsters breaking into the
food store or joy-riding, though rumour tells of worse crimes than these.
The trend towards “freedom of choice” was sharpened by the changing
demographics. Absorption of newcomers - as individuals or in groups - and a second
generation of members meant that the society became increasingly heterogeneous. Even
basic needs varied, let alone the desires beyond the very basics. Kibbutz never set out to
be an ascetic society. Although it rejected the values of the consumer society, it always
aimed to raise its standard of living according to its own definitions, in which personal
satisfaction always held a high priority. As we have seen, furniture and clothing were
among the first personal budgets to be spent as the member saw fit, and other “personal
budgets” followed. Choice of work became much more important and free - today, it is
unheard of for a member to be assigned to a job without his agreement. The individual’s
needs - in a broader sense of the word - increasingly took precedence over the needs of
the kibbutz. The nuclear family has become more important to people than the
community as a whole.
Two more general social changes had their effect. The committee which dealt with
leisure activities (pompously called the “Culture Committee”) once commanded a major
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budget. It organised at least three evening activities a week, including the weekly film,
quite apart from the activities that still centre around the Festivals. It organised hobby
groups and encouraged individual hobbies. It organised day trips at weekends and
annual trips of four or more days. In spite of efforts to please the maximum number of
people, it was inevitable that, as tastes broadened, fewer and fewer people were able to
get what they wanted from the “official” programmes. When people got TV sets,
attendance at evening programmes naturally dropped (even though early TV in Israel
was pretty bad). Concerts, plays and other forms of entertainment became more and
more available locally, which meant that the kibbutz was not the only source for them
and, again, the question of choice came up. At the same time, people left their homes
less readily, preferring family, the stereo and TV, and later the video and computer
games. Altogether, as far as leisure activities are concerned, individual consumption has
taken over from communal spending.
The second change was a quite different one. A political revolution at the beginning
of the 70s brought the right wing into power for the first time, to the accompaniment of
election propaganda that targeted the kibbutzim as the villains of left-wing hegemony.
The image of the kibbutzim, which had always been seen as the elite of Israeli society,
was reversed. Society at large turned its back on kibbutz values, which had been
admired, even when they were more honoured in the breach than in the observance. This
affected the self-image of the kibbutzim radically, adding to the internal uncertainty that
accompanied the loss of consensus. The earlier certainty and its tacit backing by society
at large have not been recovered. These processes have fragmented the walls of kibbutz
ideology.
Ten years later, at the beginning of the 80s, most kibbutzim and the kibbutz
organisation as a whole underwent something close to an economic catastrophe. They
were left with huge and crippling debts. Well over half our earnings went into paying off
interest on loans, for instance. The Treasurer’s job, never easy, became a nightmare:
several times, he had to solve a situation in which the kibbutz lacked the money even to
pay for the next month’s food. Twenty or more kibbutzim were outright bankrupt,
except that their property was not worth seizing - though I know of one case, at least,
where the members of a kibbutz had to threaten the bailiffs with sticks to prevent their
tractors and cars being repossessed.
The economic crisis meant that kibbutzim had to reconsider the way they ran their
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affairs. Objectively, as more members reached middle age and beyond, the number of
people who could no longer work hard inevitably increased. Quite aside from this,.there
was ever-increasing tendency to take whatever the kibbutz offered and give back a
minimum. A way had to be found to bring members back to a sense of personal
responsibility vis à vis the community. In the absence of the former ideological drive, the
member had to be made to face up to the fact that there was a link between what he
personally earned and what he spent.
The crisis was sharpened, in the case of many kibbutzim which were hard hit, when
the desperate shortage of cash forced them to liquidate the pension funds established for
members. In an aging population, this fundamentally changed the relationship between
the member and the community. Previously, no kibbutznik gave a thought to his material
wellbeing in old age. It was totally taken for granted that the kibbutz took full
responsibility to maintain his standard of living after he had retired from work. This was
no longer so: it seemed likely that retirement would mean a significant drop in the
member’s standard of living. Older people began to think of how they would be able to
ensure their future individually. No-one with an outside source of money - an old age
pension from previous years of work abroad or in town, a legacy, rent on a town
apartment, etc. - was prepared to hand it over to the common purse any longer.
Selfishness, fear and competitiveness are survival modes, usually serving immediate
personal needs. This explains why they are deeply embedded in human nature and, in a
biological sense, necessary. At the same time, they carry with them some of our worst
traits: greed, anger, callousness, aggression, and so on. In crises, individual needs are
often put aside. When the family or the nation is threatened with extinction, the
individual is capable of unselfishness and co-operation. This probably represents another
form of the survival mode, in this case the survival of the species. Religious or
revolutionary beliefs can also have the same effect. Although the reaction is then not
instinctive, i.e., at the genetic level, it involves the person’s belief system, which is also a
very powerful drive. Unfortunately, this suspension of individual needs only works
within the group, at the expense of increased aggression, hatred, etc. towards the outgroup. Individuals can behave pretty badly to each other, but rarely as badly as one
nation, religion or race to another.
Where Marx equated the establishment of social justice with the “withering away of
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the state”, the kibbutz set itself the aim of reconciling the two apparently contradictory
aims of equality and nationalism. It is well worth mentioning that the founders of
modern Zionism saw the establishment of a Jewish state as a matter of the survival of the
Jewish people, but firmly believed that this must be achieved without infringing the rights
of any other people - the nationalism of the kilt, not of the Ku Klux Klan. This view is
incorporated into Israel’s Declaration of Independence. It is only in the last 30 years or
so, since the survival of the State could be taken more or less for granted, that practical
Zionism has become debased into the expropriation of land and two-tiered rule. The
kibbutz population has remained true to the original, non-aggressive Zionism. Of all the
territories captured by Israel in the Six Day War, it is only on the Golan Heights that any
kibbutzim were founded, and that was on the assumption that this was an area that we
would never relinquish. This refusal to give way to the Greater Israel movement is
explained by the second, but equal aim of the kibbutz, to abolish the exploitation and
oppression of one man by another, or the weak by the strong.
In hindsight, it is possible to see the rigid ideology of the early kibbutz as another
form of oppression - the “tyranny of the majority”. It is easy to point to examples of
how individuals were sacrificed to the welfare of the community. By and large, though,
this is not how most members of kibbutzim saw it at the time. The majority either
accepted the sacrifice of personal interests willingly, or they identified themselves with
the ideology of kibbutz to such an extent that they did not feel any sense of personal
sacrifice at all. In plain language, “that’s how we do it.” Otherwise they were free to
leave the kibbutz, as in fact many did. The kibbutz is a voluntary society, which is one of
the big differences between kibbutz and Communist ideology.
What I have tried to show is that it takes extraordinary motivation to make people
suspend their natural selfishness. The founding of a Jewish state (it is relevant that, until
1967, the borders of Israel were, to a large extent, defined by the location of kibbutzim),
together with a belief in social justice, provided such motivation. It should be added that
additional support was provided by society as a whole, both in accepting kibbutz values
as an ideal and in providing government encouragement. Over the years, these motives,
as well as the support, have been eroded.
The State of Israel is a fait accompli. Its defence no longer depends on kibbutzim,
either as regards borders or idealistic manpower. The proportion of kibbutz youngsters
in the elite branches and higher echelons of the IDF is still high, but no longer
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overwhelming. The achievement the Zionist aim and the absence of a special role in
maintaining it have greatly weakened the motivation behind the kibbutz.
Public support for kibbutz values is, at the best, very low. Although the government
made expensive arrangements to bail out the kibbutzim from financial catastrophe, it
took years to force the measure through and more years to implement it. Even then, the
decision had an economic rationale, not a political one. The banks and the national
economy stood to lose much more from bankruptcy than from the rescue package,
because under the “arrangement”, as it is called, kibbutzim will pay back more than half
of what they owe in real money, whereas the losses are largely due to inflated interest,
and exist only on paper. Similar rescue packages saved major businesses in the private
sector, as well, though this fact has been overlooked by the public.
Secondly, the motivation to create a juster society has also weakened tremendously.
Increasing prosperity and the desire to keep up with the Joneses in town played their
part. It was once taken for granted that the penniless kibbutznik, once a recognisable
figure in his shorts and sandals, deserved special support from his relatives and friends in
town (and discounts in all the shops). The friends and relations may still feel obliged by
the customs of hospitality, if nothing else, but the kibbutznik is no longer prepared to be
a sponger. He also wants something like their high standard of living, now that he can
not console himself by being their conscience and standard bearer.
More important is what happened inside the kibbutz itself. After all, the kibbutz
may not be as closed a society as it once was, but it is still the kibbutznik’s immediate
environment. As conformity and discipline relaxed, the weaknesses of the system grew
more prominent. Presents that the member received from outside were always an
unresolved problem, for instance - from clothes and toys for children to furniture and
cash. Draconian measures, like docking the clothing budget of a woman who was given
a dress, were quickly abandoned, if only because it was unreasonable to discriminate
between one form of present and another. On my kibbutz, it was always thought that it
would be wrong to interfere with the presents that grandparents from outside gave to
their grandchildren on the kibbutz, so differences began to appear between one child’s
room and another’s. This difference spread to the members as well. It was a natural
course of events, because some members had relatives outside the kibbutz and others did
not, and some families were wealthier than others, while the kibbutz was never able to
afford the cost of closing the gaps that appeared as a result.
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It is to the credit of the kibbutz movement that it found ways to cope with the
specific problems of inheritance and of reparations from Germany. The latter caused a
crisis in the kibbutz movement. Some kibbutzim dealt with it better than others, but one
way or another, the crisis passed. Recently these items have become problems again,
because the ways of dealing with them are no longer seen as fair in the kibbutz of today.
Outside sources of income are no longer automatically made over to the common purse.
The failure of the kibbutz to deal adequately with other aspects of inequality, in the years
before the crisis of the 80s, contributed to this change in attitude.
Although inequality has always existed on the kibbutz, over the years it became
greater, more prominent and more widespread. When I first came to my kibbutz, there
was a member who was notorious for the fact that his lampshades alone were worth
more than all the furniture other people had. It was easy enough to shrug off the vagary
of one single member, but as such inequalities spread, they became intolerable.
The same sort of thing applied at work. The kibbutz could shrug off the fact that
one or two members were not pulling their weight at work, but not when the numbers
increased. In some cases, the judgmental community might not fully accept a health
reason that prevented a member from working, or, to be more accurate, would accept it
officially and resent it privately. This applied more strongly when a mental problem was
involved, rather than a clearly understood physical handicap.
Hardly less important was an increasing resentment of people who were judged plain
lazy, or who exploited some established custom to work shorter hours. It was only
grudgingly accepted that some jobs did not exist for the full nine or eight hours that were
standard, or were too stressful, such as cooking or looking after small children.
Awareness of variations in working hours and in the effort different jobs required put
paid to any sense that there had ever been complete equality in the work on kibbutz.
Thirdly, as possibilities and choices widened, it became clear that, naturally, some
people were better at making the system work for them than others. Some were also
more ruthless about it, because of different individual interpretations of the phrase “I’m
entitled to it...” Since the kibbutz system always tended, in practice, to work on the
principle of “it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease”, modest people or those who
despised complaining often felt that they were hard done by.
Altogether, gaps widened, and there was an increasing resentment of “cheating” (as
well as increasing cheating). The overwhelming majority of members went on living by
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the rules as best they could, but no longer felt that the community gave them enough
support. It is very difficult, even impossible in the long run, to live by the old rules you
believe in, when significant numbers of people around you seem to ignore them.
Besides, nobody is pure. Even the staunchest old-fashioned kibbutzniks usually have
some chink in their armour. It may be cutting corners at work, once in a while, or
accepting a larger than usual present, or (commonly) applying different standards of
behaviour when a close member of the family is involved. It is all part of the general
loosening up of conformity that has made life less stressful.
To what extent standards dropped, and to what extent it was a question of
increasing resentment of phenomena that had always existed, is an interesting but
pointless discussion. What matters is that inequalities on kibbutz led to a feeling that the
ideal of equality had failed altogether. This, of course, decreased the motivation that was
fuelled by idealism. That kibbutz is a “more equal” or a “more just” society, rather than
“equal” and “just” is a pragmatic reality, unacceptable to the idealist, who typically sees
things in black and white. It is common to hear the claim that, because equality was
never 100%, there was never any equality at all.
The member’s identification with the community grew thinner, too. In a small
democratic community, every member feels personally involved in every decision. On
the kibbutz, every major decision came to the General Assembly, which was faithfully
attended by most members. It was easy to scrutinise proposals and raise objection to the
decisions made by elected committees or a particular office-holder. Many members
served on one committee or another. As administration became more complex, the
number of committees grew, and they had to be given wider powers, because the
multiplication of details made it impossible to bring all of them to the Assembly. It was
much harder for a member to understand issues, especially financial ones, but also others
that involved expert knowledge. The Assembly could deal only with matters of principle
or decisions that had to fit into given parameters, such as how to split up the annual
budget, with no real say in how much the total would be. Administrators had to become
politicians, to convince the Assembly of their points, and members were not slow to
suspect that they were being manipulated.
The kibbutzim grew in size, which made discussions at the Assembly wearisome and
able to deal with fewer matters. Attendance dropped drastically, for this and other
reasons. Many kibbutzim were too big for the Assembly to run things with any sort of
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efficiency, and power was devolved to an elected representative Council. Lobbies and
interest groups sprang up inevitably, as the population grew more diverse. A
phenomenon of “clans” - inter-related families - became a factor in the power structure
of many kibbutzim. As the member felt further removed from direct decision-making and
felt his influence as an individual shrinking, as he had to shout louder and louder to make
himself heard, his efforts and involvement waned.
I don’t think this could have been avoided. Complexity, size and divergence arose
out of the success of the kibbutz. The drop in motivation played a major part, too, and
that was also unavoidable. The result is that a sense of alienation from the kibbutz
institutions is a major problem today. When a member sees the kibbutz as an institution,
distinct from himself, instead of as an intimate community, a family in which he is a peer,
it has long-reaching effects. This is not new, either: kibbutzniks have always treated
public property worse than their own private property. However, alienation from the
kibbutz is a dangerous trend. For instance, it introduces into the kibbutz the universal
attitude that cheating or stealing from an institution is less of a crime than stealing from
individuals. Again, many members feel remote from the centres of power and influence.
The concept of “them” and “us” becomes dominant. The common human reaction to
such a situation is that, the harder it is to influence matters, the less you bother with
them. Power then goes to those who want it, and opposition is left to the Cassandras.
You’ll remember that Cassandra operated under a curse.
I have tried to show that the radical changes that have taken place in the structure of
the kibbutz and in the way the community runs its affairs are a combination of internal
and external influences. Before summing them up, though, I think it is important to point
out that one of the great strengths of this form of community has always been its ability
and readiness to change. It is said that there is no-one as conservative as the old
revolutionary, but in spite of people’s innate resistance to change, which tends to
increase as they grow older, the kibbutz society has changed continually, from its very
beginning. Present changes have to be seen in this context. Many of the moments in the
evolution of kibbutz, which were seen at the time as its death-knell, now seem sensible
and inevitable; and sometimes the fear these moments aroused looks downright ludicrous
to us today. The abolition of the public shower, the arrival of the individual kettle, the
radio and the TV set in the member’s house, the change of children’s sleeping quarters to
their parents’ houses, the freeing of the personal budgets for the member to spend
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according to their own priorities are all examples of such moments. In all cases, they
were introduced to relieve intolerable problems, and the kibbutz survived them; yet one
can see in them a steady trend to the situation today.
It is also worth bearing in mind that these changes took place over a comparatively
long period of time. They represent the evolution of the society, not its gradual collapse.
All sorts of problems arose over this time that could not have been foreseen from the
outset, and especially matters of increasing diversity, prosperity and aging. They
demanded the ability to move away from earlier homogenous simplicity. I think that it is
one of the great achievements of the kibbutz, no less than building oases in the
wilderness, that it survived so many crises and changes, and still keeps its status as a
special form of community.
In fact, some of the external pressures - wars and poverty - probably unified and
strengthened the communities even more than they threatened them, but this is not true
of the negative effect of the hostility to the kibbutz movement from the beginning of the
70s, which has hardly slackened since. The kibbutz movement grew up in a hostile
environment: the capitalist society against which its members revolted, the land and
climate where they settled, the Mandatory government and the Arabs. There were two
new elements at this time, though. One was that the hostility was of ordinary Israelis,
who had generally given them at least tacit support before, and the other that it came at a
time when the kibbutz had entered a period of self-doubt.
Whatever the wide and deep internal ideological squabbles before then, the kibbutz
movement as a whole had always been sure of its way before. After the Six-Day War, its
role in the security of the country was no longer vital to the existence of the State. The
role of kibbutzniks as leaders of the working class was also a thing of the past, on the
one hand because kibbutzim were now employers (in spite of a nearly successful lastditch stand against hired labour in 1966) and on the other because the glorification of
manual labour was no longer relevant. The “conquest of the desert” had been achieved,
at least locally, wherever kibbutzim stood. The kibbutz needed new roles, but could not
find them, and hence the self-doubt.
The original kibbutz ideology contained weaknesses that grew ever more prominent.
One was that conformity is possible only in an environment of limited possibilities. The
drive to individualism is a strong one, which can only be held in by iron discipline. Once
that discipline is relaxed even slightly, there is no stopping the cracks from widening.
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That is the reason why ultra-religious communities expel even the mildest deviants, and
totalitarian regimes imprison those that question them. Kibbutz has always been a free
society, so it was inevitable from the first that, when external pressures eased,
individualism would burst out, as if from an egg. Greater emphasis on the individual led
to what the kibbutz calls “privatisation”, that is, dividing out as much of its resources as
possible equally between members, to do with as they see fit. For the time being,
housing, health, raising children, legal and family aid (the costs of marriage, divorce and
supporting parents, for instance) and municipal services remain communal resources,
dispensed according to need. The degree of privatisation varies quite widely from
kibbutz to kibbutz, but the trend is quite clearly to extend it, for instance to the dining
hall and the laundry.
Another weakness was wastage, in various forms. When resources - from food and
fuel to the opportunity to study - are available without a price-tag to the individual,
waste is unavoidable. Even a person who was brought up to eat everything on his plate,
easily gets used to throwing food away when he doesn’t like it or has taken too much. It
became common for kibbutzniks and their children to leave their heaters or airconditioners on while they were at work, so that they could come back to a comfortable
room. In addition, as I mentioned, a double standard always existed in the treatment of
public and private property. The kibbutz system deliberately abolished the link between
personal spending and personal earning - for good, idealistic motives, of course - but was
never able to link individual spending with collective income. The kibbutznik, quite
understandably, could not feel that when he spent a few shekels, it affected the millions
that the kibbutz turned over during the year, or that a minor slackening of effort on his
part weakened the whole. It was axiomatic that what was available to one was available
to all, regardless of the economic factors that control expenditure in town - earning
capacity, health, children and other overriding expenses.
The financial difficulties that hit many kibbutzim and the Kibbutz Movement itself at
the beginning of the 80s left them with no alternative but to re-establish the link between
the individual’s earning power and his expenditure. Privatisation was not enough to do
this - though I doubt whether children will wear two clean sets of clothes every day once
the laundry is “privatised”. Today. the kibbutz movement is considering the more direct
way to establish this link: wage differentials. A number of kibbutzim have adopted this
method already, in a controlled form.
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It is arguable that privatisation is a form of collective distribution of resources that
differs from supply according to need only in its form. Once you recognise that
distribution according to need did not lead to equality, the inequality inherent in
distribution according to cash value is only a matter of degree, not a matter of kind. In
other words, only the mechanism changed, and if this led to less equality, which is
probably true, that has to be weighed against a greater degree of personal satisfaction.
The introduction of the differential wage, though, which links the member’s personal
earning power (calculated according to the skewed values of society at large) to his
income, is another matter. It abolishes the concept that all work is of equal intrinsic
value and that all people are intrinsically equal. As a mechanism to encourage people to
work harder, to accept responsibility (which is rewarded) and to recognise the limitations
of their spending power, it may well work. It is too early to know. Unlike giving every
family an electric kettle, though, it goes against a fundamental value of the kibbutz.
It makes the question “are you still a kibbutz?” a legitimate one. Just as, in my eyes,
anyone who thinks he is a Jew is one, so I think that as long as we call ourselves a
kibbutz, we are one. In both cases, though, the legal position is not so simple. In any
sense, it all depends on how you define them.
© 1999 George Ney
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