The Books of My Life: Kibbutz

 

When I was young in the 1970s I, if memory serves, I recall that I romanticised the Israeli kibbutz movement, specifically the "secular" Israeli kibbutz movement, and I romanticised "secular" Zionism and, as a logical consequence, the state of Israel. However, experience with the kibbutzim in the 1970s along with rising cynicism related to the anti-Vietnam war movement, governmental responses to the peace movement, government and corporate lying, capitalist flim flammery, the negative as well as positive wages of secular and religious zionism, and a host of other de-romanticising currents in the post-sixties era, cured me once and for all of romanticism, utopianism, saint making, and a missionary zeal to change the world, at least beyond the occasional armchair intellectual varieties of each.

Despite all of this I still have an interest in communal movements like those of the Hutterites, which has been around for hundreds of years, and the kibbutzim, both of which show that there are viable and workable political, economic, and cultural alternatives to dominant and mainstream forms of political, economic, and cultural organisation and action. Given this continued interest in the kibbutzim, moshavim, and workers cooperatives, it should not be surprising that I finally got around to reading one of the classic works of social science on the kibbutz, Melford Spiro's Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, augmented edition, 1970. Kibbutz would turn out to be the first of a three-book trilogy Spiro would write and periodically update between the 1960s and the 2000s. Kibbutz was updated in 1963 and 1970. The second, Children of the Kibbutz, was published in 1958 and updated in 1965 and 1975. The last, Gender and Culture: The Kibbutz Revisited, was published in 1979 and updated in 1996.

All three of Spiro's works on the secular and socialist kibbutz he gave the anonymous name Kiryat Yedidim to, are grounded on Spiro and his wife's almost a year's worth of ethnographic fieldwork in 1951 at Kiryat Yedidim and periodic returns to the kibbutz in the 1960s and 1970s. Spiro's Kibbutz, however, is not simply an ethnography. Spiro not only explores the contemporary economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of Kiryat Yedidim during the year he was there, he also explores the history of Kiryat Yedidim and its relation to broader Israeli societym if too briefly. Spiro provides us with a short prehistory of Kiryat Yedidim. He explores the romantic, romantic socialist, and romantic zionist background of Yedidim's founders who immgrated from Poland to Palestine in the 1920s. He explores the harsh environment of central Palestine that the kibbutz grew up in and the changes it experienced as it grew up. He explores the communal agricultural dominated economic system of the kibbutz. He explores the participatory democratic political organisation of Yedidim with its rotating offices. He explores the migrations or aliyas of later generations to the commune and the cultural tensions this sometimes brought.

Spiro's attention to tensions point up the fact that Spriro's Kibbutz is not grounded in a purely equilibrium, consensus, or static approach to social and cultural formations. While Spiro notes, for instance, that high social status attached to agricultural work in a commune where the founders romanticised and celebrated agricultural work and going back to nature, he also explores the lower status service sector of Yedidim and the need to rotate these jobs because many did not want to do them, and the tensions that seemed to be inherent in this sector of the Yedidim  economy. He explores the somewhat gendered, as we would call it today, nature of the service sector and the tensions this brought. He explores socialisation practises in the kibbutz, particularly as it relates to child rearing and schooling, and the tensions these sometimes brought.

One of the most interesting, at least to me, aspects of Spiro's Kibbutz is his contention, a contention I find compelling, that Kiryat Yedidim and other similar kibbutzim, are akin to religious sects. Religion, after all, at least on one level, is about meaning and "secular" social forms, including social movements like the kibbutz movement, also give meaning to the world around and to their place in the world around them. As Spiro notes, the meaning system, some of the symbol system, and some of the rites of passage associated with the commune, were grounded in a meaning system that was messianic, millennial, millennialist, evangelical and ethnocentric. Yedidim's kibbutzniks believed that were a city on a hill, a light unto the world, an instantiation--Yedidim and other kibbutzim created an institution and organisation grounded in these cultural ideologies--of how the world could potentially be not as it was but as it was realistically imagined and concretely put in place.

Spiro's book is not without its problems. His prophetic abilities, for instance, are sometimes less than perfect as he himself notes in the updates to the book. In the original text of Kibbutz Spiro contends that a transformation in Yedidim's Soviet Union as messianic and missionary ideologies would lead to a transformation of the commune, if not its end, if they declined and vanished proved wrong. He emphasises the tensions female "gossip" brought at Kiryat Yedidim but he does not explore the role male "gossip" might have played in raising tensions in Yedidim. He doesn't square the circle between the respective impacts of nature and nurture, broader economic, political, and cultural factors, on tensions over family, child rearing, service sector work, which was becoming gendered with more women doing service work and less doing agricultural labour, as I noted earlier. He doesn't compare the kibbutz movement with one of its perhaps closest relatives, Hutterite communes and communalism. He doesn't give as full an exploration and explanation of the various kibbutzim federations as I would like to have seen. Still, Spiro's book is a very interesting historical, social and cultural anthropological, and sociological approach to the Israeli commune movement, and I highly recommend it. Essential reading for anyone interested in alternative social systems and communal and cooperative forms of organisation.