Monday - March 05, 2007
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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