From Society to Community: Privatizing the Israeli Kibbutz (1975-2020)

Abstract

This work is about the end of socialism. It is about how the socialist experiment of the twentieth century collapsed, and about what it means for a society to transition from socialism to capitalism. The case study is the Israeli kibbutz, a network of small-scale collectivized communes that were established in Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century and that were privatized in the early 2000s. The study combines archival research and ethnographic fieldwork following the kibbutz from its late-socialist era of the 1970s to its post-socialist period of the 2020s. The dissertation makes three interlocking arguments. First, is an intervention in the historiographical debate about the fall of kibbutz socialism. The existing literature attributes the fall of the kibbutz either to internal economic deficiencies or external pressure from the capitalist surroundings. This study argues that the underlying crisis of the kibbutz’s non-market system was not economic but social. Counterintuitively, the elimination of the market and the creation of an egalitarian non-alienated society made interpersonal relations less, not more peaceful. Unending debates, the flourishing of envy and resentment, and a constant need for moralizing and peer pressure were some of the expressions of a chronic crisis of social mediation opened up by the elimination of the market. In the long run, these processes corroded kibbutz society and contributed to its subsequent downfall. The case of the kibbutz raises a relevant question for the current discussion on post-capitalism and direct democracy: the market is unjust and alienated but what are some of the consequences of organizing social relations so that they are independent of the market? This study also makes a theoretical contribution to the anthropology of ethics by analyzing some of the ethical affordances of a non-market economy. In the kibbutz, the non-market economy had an impact on local meta-ethics: it expanded the area of social reality that was given to moral evaluation. In different areas of economic activity, the non-market arrangements had the effect of highlighting the role of human moral agency in the constitution of social reality thereby “moralizing” these areas in a new way. Hence, the socialist kibbutz was “more moral” than the privatized kibbutz, not because it was more just or because its members behaved more virtuously, but simply because a greater part of its social reality was given to moral evaluation in the first place. Finally, the dissertation also contributes to the study of post-socialism and cultural change. One of its main findings is that the transition from socialism to capitalism in the kibbutz entailed not only a change of cultural content but a more fundamental shift in the approach to culture as such. Since the old kibbutz lacked material sanction and incentive it heavily relied on adherence to shared cultural norms. This entailed a substantive approach to culture, in which society has a mandate to prescribe and police concrete cultural content. Following privatization, the introduction of market-based remuneration and legal sanctions diminished the importance of shared cultural norms. Accordingly, the kibbutz shifted to a procedural approach that emphasizes individual autonomy over the cultivation of shared cultural content. In other words, the dissertation finds a correlation between a non-market economy and a more conservative, interventionist cultural politics, a relationship with important implications for social movements focused on reducing the influence of markets on society.