Monday - March 05, 2007

Category Image A Failed Experiment in Pure Communism


I remember as a young school child learning about different countries that the Israelis had these communities called Kibbutzes. It was a communist dream, people living in harmony, each earning according to his needs, each working according to his ability. Most horrifying to me was that children were not allowed to live with their parents, but were raised by the village, in communal dorms.

Even at that young age I thought, "What a crock!"

Well, now I learn that the kibbutzes are all failing. Duh. Unknown to me, the reason they've taken so long to fail is because the government was subsidizing them.

The Jewish stereotype of the greedy capitalists who would chisel their own mother's last pennies in interest is strangely incompatible with the Jewish stereotype of being communist. Since none of the Jews I know are in either category, it's hard to understand where the first stereotype comes from, but just looking at the kibbutz and the high percentage of Jewish communist party members certainly explain the second stereotype.

We must admit that the kibbutzes were about the best, most pure modern attempt to make communism work without bloodshed. History has shown that communism can work, with numerous examples throughout the ages. The only problem being that the stagnation of the communist society will do it in eventually, and can only survive by oppression. The Spartans were thoroughly communist and militaristic and they prospered for centuries. But they lived off the productive labor of the Helots. The price of their status quo was that the Spartans had to maintain constant vigilance for Helot revolts. They also suffered from birth rates that could not sustain its numbers. The lesson to learn from the Spartans is that communism lasts only so long as the people are kept forcibly enslaved.

Of course, this was demonstrated again in large scale in Soviet Russia. They succeeded in exporting their version of communism throughout the world, but it was only ever done at the end of a gun.

Now we're told that the Kibbutzes in Israel only ever succeeded because they were subsidized. They didn't teach me that inconvenient fact when I was in grade school. But the subsidies dried up in the 1980's and shortly after that, the kibbutzes begain rapid failure and shifts to capitalism. So the kibbutzes kept their communist reputation, but began shedding their anti-capitalist ideas.

I always wondered what type of perverse person would live in a kibbutz and allow their children to be taken away and sent to live in a dorm. What was the point in doing that? Didn't kibbutzers love their children? Apparently not.

I think the following quotes from the article I linked to are perfect examples of why communism can't work without oppression:

"I know that if I work hard, that I'll earn the same as the person living next to me who works less."

"There is something in the education, that begins at the bottom, that there's no point in being terribly successful."

I'm glad the farce of the kibbutzes is finally revealed. The struggle against soviet communism is over. Now the farce of granola communism can no longer point to the kibbutz as a model.

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