Review of "Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement" by James Horrox

This is, for the most part, 137 pages of disappointment, with the feeling that somewhere in there is a better book struggling to get out. I'd hoped that the author really had uncovered some unknown-to-me connections between proper class struggle anarchists and the people who had founded developed the kibbutz movement. Spoiler alert; he hasn't. The book is about how the early kibbutzim were, to an extent, inspired by the writings of some utopian socialists and spiritually oriented Tolstoyans, and not only driven by necessity towards communal living, but that's hardly a surprise. After finding out that Emma Goldman had written favourably about anarchist comrades among the Jewish settlers in Palestine I was hoping to find out more, but I didn't. 

Instead we learn that some of the founders of the utopian and "nonpolitical" socialist currents among the early Zionist settlers had read Kropotkin. Others were inspired by a mainly-forgotten German utopian called Gustav Landauer, who had once been a class struggle anarchist but moved towards the slightly creepy spiritual-awakening, personal transformation tendency. Ironically, Landauer ended up Education Minister in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic before being murdered by the Freikorps as the republic was overthrown. 

More familiar figures are also discussed, like the prophet of Jewish personal transformation through physical labour A D Gordon and the Labour Zionist Chaim Arlosoroff - the book doesn't mention it, but his former girlfriend Magda became Mrs Goebbels, which surely merits a Netfix mini-series. Horrox cites both of these as influencers of another sort of socialism, distinct from the Marxism of the Labour Zionists in Poalei Zion and Left Poalei Zion, in the emerging Jewish settler community in interwar Palestine, which he chooses to call anarchism. I'd be very surprised if either Gordon or Arlosoroff ever thought of themselves as anarchists. Arlosoroff was a big fan of staying close to the British, and was also intrumental in the Haavara agreement with the Nazis, so not exactly your typical anarchist.

Weirdly, there is almost no account of the historical and political context in which this was happening. Zionist immigration, the construction of the Zionist state-in-waiting, and the creation of the network of utopian communes on which the book focuses, all took place in the framework enabled by a British colonial occupation. Zionist settlers could be Marxists or anarchists or anything else, but they could not do without the shelter of the British military force and civil administration. An independent, majority-ruled Palestine, democratic or not, would have put an end to Jewish mass immigration. 

Horrox touches on this in passing, but it's far from the focus of the book. And he entirely buys into the Zionist argument that the refusal to employ Arab labour was a principled, moral refusal to be exploiters, rather than a conscious attempt to create an ethnically segregated labour market, explicitly on the South African model. He treats the Histradrut as if it were a "normal" trade union, rather than an instrument for the construction of that segregated labour market, ignoring the historical analysis of - for example Zachary Lockman's "Comrades and Enemies". 

There is another book to be written about the subjective commitment to socialism and even Marxism by people who were objectively engaged in a colonial enterprise that was tied to British imperialism. It's not a straightforward matter of hypocrisy. History is full of ironies like this, with the eco-anarchist Rojava enclave in northern Syria that sheltered under the umbrella of US air power is only the most recent. The Zionist socialist parties were mainly accepted as such by their comrades in other countries, even in apparently revolutionary internationals like the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, in which Left Poalei Zion and Hashomer Hatzair participated at the representatives of Palestine alongside the Bund from Poland and the POUM from Spain.

Horrox does describe the minutiae of kibbutz organisation in the glowing terms I remember from my days in a Zionist youth movement, but doesn't give a moment's cosideration to the the fact that some kibbutzim were built on the ruins of depopulated arab villages, or that almost none of them have ever admitted an arab member. Oh, and he repeats uncritically the assertion that there was "no crime" within kibbutzim, ignoring all that has come to light about sexual harrassment and rape.

It's really a shame, because there is an important book to be written about what the kibbutz experience means for at least one kind of anarchist model of the transition from capitalism to something better. Despite all the above, and despite the awful context, it's possible to still be enthusiastic about the kind of self-managed enterprise and collective consumption offered by the kibbutz, and to see a very high level of communal sharing and a very low level of private property as a viable and even luxurious alternative to privatised individual and family existence. Even knowing what I do about the history, I still retain a great affection for the feel of kibbutz life that I experienced in the 1970s and 1980s.

These ideas about "secession" and walkaway, of building an alternative economy within the shell of the existing society, are increasingly popular, as they often are when more direct political programs for change seem hopeless. There is a lot of hope placed on Community Land Trusts, cooperatives, social enterprises, and mutual aid networks.

And the kibbutz experience was perhaps the best opportunity that this model has ever been given. The kibbutzim were not marginalized or despised outsiders in the Zionist proto-state, or later in Israel; they were cherished, cossetted, and treated as an elite, akin to the English landed gentry. They had access to cheap land from the Jewish National Fund, and cheap credit from state and semi-private financial institutions. 

So the ultimate failure of the kibbutzim to thrive, even in these favourable circumstances, but within the overall context of an increasingly unequal and consumption-driven society, ought to be instructive. Rather than radiating socialism, however defined, out into the wider Israeli society, the kibbutzim instead absorbed the worst aspects of it into themselves. Horrox does describe what can only be seen as the degeneration of the kibbutz model, even within its own terms, though he doesn't really explain why the kibbutzniks themselves don't for the most part seem to have thought it was worth preserving or defending. There's some quite interesting stuff in the end about new forms of urban collective living, and about the small anarchist groups in Israel that are, to Horrox's disdain, mainly uninterested in the kibbutz history, but it can't make up for the missed opportunities of the book.

POSTSCRIPT: On p58 the author writes "During the 1930s many anarchists within the kibbutz movement travelled to Spain themselves to join the CNT-FAI militia." Although the book has a lot of footnotes he doesn't cite any source for this. I couldn't find any trace of it in web searches. There isn't any mention of it in "Madrid Before Hanita", the film about Jews from Palestine who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, though that does focus on the International Brigades so is more about volunteers who were Communist-oriented. So I wrote to the author, and he hasn't responded yet. I also wrote to a few others with some expertise in this area, including Professor Raanan Rein, who knew nothing about it. I am left with the unavoidable conclusion that this "fact" is just made up to suit a narrative.