Kibbutzim

March 2024 Forums General discussion Kibbutzim

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  • #86095
    alanjjohnstone
    Keymaster

    http://www.solhaam.org/articles/kibbut.html

    The success and wealth of kibbutzim resulted from large capital sums provided without strings by world-wide Jewish communities. Kibbutzim now own and operate factories, hotels and restaurants, and much else. Three per cent of Israel's population, about 125,000 people, live in 270 kibbutzim ranging in size from say 200 to 2,000 members. They produce something like 50 per cent of Israel's agricultural produce and about 9 per cent of its industrial goods. 

    Quote:
    'From each according to their ability, to each according to their need' is practiced. The kibbutz looks after its members from cradle to grave and this includes education and social security. 

    It was only through this kind of co-operative living that a deprived people could settle successfully in a hostile environment. Aided by the community at large, the settlements successfully struggled to establish themselves and prospered. But there are few kibbutz members who do not know that the pioneering spirit, the drive and motivation to succeed, diminished and evaporated with success…

     Economic success, social security and wealth came in, co-operative principles went out. Working for their own benefit, they became profit-taking owners and employers. Kfar Blum and Kfar Hanasi, for example, employ workers from outside in their factories. None of the manual workers in Kfar Hanasi's foundry is a member of the kibbutz. Kibbutzim have become employers of labour. Co-operative ideology has been replaced by self-interest. To this extent is their higher standard of living and quality of life the result of profiting from the work of others…

    members are to be paid according to the market value of their work. What is the value of one person's work when compared with another? How do you assess the value to the kibbutz, to the community, of the work of a nurse, teacher, manual worker, musician or manager? Market value is a rate of pay which outside the kibbutz rewards service to directors and chief executives and not service to the community. Introducing differential pay is often the prelude to managers, directors or professionals demanding higher differentials and pay for themselves. Demanding the higher pay which can be earned outside as a result of maximising profits regardless of its cost to the community…

    Afikim, with 1,400 residents the second-largest kibbutz in Israel, has factories which are 'run on purely capitalistic lines by boards of directors, mostly outside experts appointed for their business or technical acumen.' Its industrial enterprises have been separated from the kibbutz community. Policy setting and management have been distanced from kibbutz members and it would appear that to this extent managers and directors have begun to take over control from kibbutz members. Kibbutz members are at risk of losing control over their destiny as community-orientated decision-taking moves towards profit-maximising. And so one would like to know more about their policy setting processes, about how they hire and fire directors and managers, about how the pay of directors and managers compares with kibbutz members.

    Kfar Hanasi are now treating individual kibbutz operations as profit centres, looking at their profitability and costing labour. 'Contribution to profits' seems to be replacing 'service to community', motivation and commitment. None of the manual workers in Kfar Hanasi's foundry is a member of the kibbutz. Kfar Hanasi are now treating individual kibbutz operations as profit centres, looking at their profitability and costing labour. Differential salaries are being discussed and kibbutz members are to have the choice of community dining, eating out or cooking at home. Kfar Hanasi's Member Assembly has been replaced by closed circuit television apparently because it has been 'so poorly attended in recent years'. Motivation is lacking, people do not seem to care any more. The young tend to leave the kibbutz, and there is a fear of people leaving. What seems to be happening in this kibbutz is that 'contribution to profits' is coming in, pay differentials are coming in, decision-taking by members is going out, 'service to community', motivation and commitment are going out, younger members are leaving…

    …about ten years ago inflation in Israel reached over 200 per cent and exceeded interest rates then being charged, borrowing again seemed cheap. And kibbutzim took out large loans from banks. But the banks were not giving money away as had the Jewish communities. Inflation dropped to 50 per cent and then to 20 per cent while interest rates stayed high at 60 per cent and then 40 per cent. As a result many kibbutzim now have to repay what they borrowed, have to repay large debts and pay high interest charges to the banks. In a deal completed with the government, the banks agreed to write off a quarter of the debts. The kibbutzim have to repay debts totalling something like GBP 1.5 billion. A condition is that 'kibbutzim will have to cut back on many of their non-profitable operations'. So it seems that these kibbutzim are expected to maximise profits (for the benefit of money lenders) at the expense of what may be more worth-while community-orientated activities…

    …Kibbutz members are at risk of losing control over their destiny when community-orientated decision-taking moves towards profit-maximising.

     

     
     

    #132287
    ALB
    Keymaster

    That's the way all coops eventually end up if they last any length of time. As the French Marxist Jules Guesde put it in 1910:

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    To pretend that you can go in for anything but capitalism in a capitalist society is really an unheard-of folly. General laws, born out of the form of property, impose themselves, and those people who want to build oases in the desert cannot escape those laws; the oasis will be swept by the simoom just as the desert is. And the oasis in this case is the co-operative, forced to bow before commercial or mercantile necessities. I know that you can remedy this evil partly by confederating your societies, and I congratulate you for entering upon and persevering in this road; but, once more, whatever you do upon co-operative ground, you cannot help being governed by all the laws which determine and regulate production and exchange in the society of profit of to-day.
    #132288
    alanjjohnstone
    Keymaster

    I have often used the Guesde article and also cherry-pick an even earlier one is from the Chartist, Ernest Jones

    Quote:
    “I contend that co-operation as now developed, must result in failure to the majority of those concerned, and that it is merely perpetuating the evils which it professes to remove… That the co-operative-system, as at present practised, carries within it the germs of dissolution, would inflict a renewed evil on the masses of the people, and is essentially destructive of the real principles of co-operation.  Instead of abrogating profitmongering, it re-creates it.  Instead of counteracting competition, it re-establishes it.  Instead of preventing centralisation, it renews it—merely transferring the role from one set of actors to another. Your co-operative ranks are thinned, your firms find, one by one, they can no longer in make the returns equal the expenses, they cannot sell as cheap as the capitalist, they can therefore no more command the market, their co-operative fires die out in quick succession, stores and mills close over their deluded votaries—and the great ruin will stand bald, naked, and despairing in the streets.” 

     http://gerald-massey.org.uk/jones/c_misc_letters_etc_1.htm scroll down for the article A Letter to the Advocates of the Co-operative Principle, where presents his own solution – a national unionSince the Rochdale Pioneers of 1844 we have near-on two hundred years of cooperative practice so the criticism isn't just some theoretical rejection of a tentative project but built on empirical evidence of cooperatives under capitalism that has been tried and tested and found to have failed.I am always surprised that many left-wingers still promote them as stepping stones on the path to socialism.Why aren't they also advocating monastic "socialism", although the more nuanced often approve of Dhammic socialism which appears much more progressively hip to them.Many working-class Scots youth swear blind by one particular product of some monks — Buckfast fortified tonic wine (hic!) 

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