Dreams don’t last for ever. Didn’t you know?

In November of 2005 we had the 60 year’s reunion of the American Gareen “Zion”of the Hashomer Hatzair movement. I was born in Poland and came to the USA for family reasons in 1947. Soon after I have joined this movement & we have formed the seventh American Aliya group by that name. After coming to Israel since end of 1950 till 1956 we have joined kibutz Gal-On. Some of us did not come to Israel or came & went back. Other’s yet have settled in the Israeli cities. A third of us live (& some are buried) in Gal On. Our friends in the USA keep in contact with us because they think their lives there, too, were influenced by common experiences in the youth movement. Every five years, since 1990, we hold a reunion. A debate in the internet has developed & my contribution deals with the state of crisis of the kibutz movement.

Dreams don’t last for ever. Didn’t you know?
by Mordechai Kafry

Some letters with nitpicking criticisms of the kibutz & Israel’s failures were raised as if they were what matters to us to day. But Shalom Endelman’s question “What happened to our dream?” is poignant & justly touches our sense of failure in our old age.

Speaking of dreams: in the 1920’s, a young poet came to Palestine. He had a special understanding of dreams. His name was Y. (that’s all I know) Papiernikov. He was a self centered modest young man, who got himself a job sweeping sidewalks in Tel Aviv and continued at it almost all of his life. He did not raise a family & devoted all of his free time to writing songs in Yiddish & creating tunes for them. In Poland & near by lands his songs were sung & made him famous. At home in Israel he was resented for writing in the language of the Gola. But he could not be punished because he had no aspirations that could be denied... He lived long & in the late 80’s American literati came to look for him & found him in a flop house living in dire penury - without complaints. The literati raised hell in the mayor’s office & in the Press – Yiddish had become more respectable in time – so the mayor sent social workers who got the poet a little room & some help so he could die better off.

What has he got to do with our dreams? Well in 1946 I heard in Poland a beautiful song called “zol zein…” I have loved the tune, but did not figure out the rest of the words & only in the 90’s I read a mention of the song & the name of its author. I started looking around & discovered that Yaakov Schwartz –an elderly member of our kibbutz – is proud of remembering Yiddish songs that are forgotten by all. I asked him & 10 minutes later & had the remarkable text before me.

Some 20 years ago I wrote an essay of summing up our kibutz experiences in the Galon paper. I started it with the old proverb that the gift of prophecy was taken away from Israel & given to infants, the mad, & the imbeciles. I insisted that some poets had real prophetic powers. I mentioned Henrich Heine who wrote in 1841 in a book in prose called “Lutezia“ that some day Germany will become a herd of bleating sheep led by a shepherd with an iron staff. He hoped the future generations will be born with thick skins to withstand the beating & torture by the shepherd’s executioners. He also wrote that people who advocate burning books will wind up burning people. So, we found out these were real prophecies only when they become a part of the past.

Then closer to home: the poet Abba Kovner wrote “galtah haschina mhatzero shel hakibutz” (divine inspiration has departed from the court yard of the kibutz). I have read it as a warning, because poets can say intuitively things no one can prove - & a social scientist would have to. I have written in response that Kovner has made some other prophecies that were wrong. In 1956 when the Russians were arming Egypt & Syria he predicted “Sof habayit hashlishi!” (“The end of the third temple!”). But I knew Kovner had a point, now. The kibbutzim were then still a great economic success, but have lost their impact on society at large & more & more of their children are leaving upon reaching adulthood. So I wrote that so long as you succeed economically you are quite safe. But I saw a serious warning in our loss of ability to make our endeavor attractive & influential in Israeli society.

Here comes in the song of Papiernikov: ”So what if I build myself castles up in air/ so what if my God does not exist anywhere / in a dream I see clearer, in dreams I feel better /in sleep I see the sky is even bluer then blue/ So what if I will never reach my goal / so what if my ship will not reach the shore/ my aim is not to reach a final destination / my aim is to keep walking on a sunny road.”

Now we learn! But he saw it so long ago. I would have loved the words if I knew them when I heard the tune. But I thought then that I was sure of my goals & my road would be sunny. And it was, but the goals were reached before our lives ended...

Someone said it even earlier, and he was not even a poet, his name was Edward Bernstein. After Marx died he was the man Engels entrusted with editing the pile of unfinished manuscripts into the second & third volumes of Das Kapital. Then Bernstein outgrew his masters & decided that Marx made a brilliant critique of his contemporary capitalism but no man can foretell the future. The premises of Marx’s socialism were philosophical & not politically actual: Hegel’s “negation of the negation” & “development of a society into it’s opposite”’ - remember mosh bogrim in 1949? He discovered, in the beginning of the 20th century, that a large part of the workers in the most advanced capitalist countries were becoming well off - enough to make an anti capitalist revolution impossible. He then wrote that “the goal is nothing – the movement is everything!” The movement he proposed was to be devoted to reforms beneficial to the workers & the poor while capitalism exists - in contemporary terms - welfare society. Later the capitalists were frightened by the communist successes in the undeveloped countries & have learned enough Marxism to beat socialism in its own game. They compromised with welfare society even where there was no significant socialist movement such as North America. Now when communism is no threat anymore the capitalists are reverting to so called “Thatcherism”. The poor don’t fight back & the better off sympathize with the poor – at the most.

In the old debates I was in favor of giving a long term credit to the October revolution. In 1955 I met Chaim Gunner. It was just after the USSR has started arming Egypt & Syria. Chaim said. “The Dulles brothers refuse to send up-to-date weapons to the middle-east, while the communists have no such scruples. So who are the warmongers now?” I had to agree with him. The credit I once gave to the revolution was gone. I could not sympathize with the soviet leaders or their policies anymore. I still had hopes for socialism to reassert itself, but none for its policies at home & abroad.

The communists had turned Marxism into a religion of power over economics & had many initial successes in early industrialization, planned development, science & education, but could not compete with capitalism further on. They created a system based on police- power politics & replaced talented people with politically compliant stooges. Their surplus capital was diverted to building an enormous army & a reverse imperialism. While the capitalists have profited from their imperialism, the communists have subsidized their overseas allies with free weapons & immense capital investments like the Aswan dam. The Soviet “nomenclature” was raised to standards of living of the capitalist rich & corruption was ever more close to power. The system became very conservative by all standards.

At the same time Capitalism has developed a system of managerial talent head hunting & application of social science to business & it is prospering. It has invented turning advertisement into a system of monopoly within the so called free trade & revived monopoly high profits. It has managed to make its periodical economic crises short timed & less severe. Manipulators of “other people’s money” & inventions became the great billionaires of our time. Socialism did not become scientific, as it has claimed, but capitalism did & it did win. Realizing that does not make us pro capitalist. We know its faults & that they get ever worse with time. But all we can fight for realistically are reforms from within. The total alternative became an only dream.

The kibbutz movement will soon be a hundred years old. For an unreligious Utopian experiment that is very long time – more then 3 generations have lived in them. The communist & social democratic experiments in nationalization of the economy are long dead because they could not compete with the revitalized contemporary capitalism. The kibbutzim lasted longer because they were founded & maintained in a constant struggle against capitalism for their people. For every remaining kibutznick there are a number of ex kibutznicks outside. But the kibbutzim – some large, many small – have survived, if only, as community- villages. A third of them, mostly the most affluent ones, have remained true to their original communal values. Yet there is a sense of decline & even betrayal of values, of a golden age in the past, & of inability to cope with the change or with the inability to change. The main reason for change is the departure of the children from the kibbutz. To bring them back you try to introduce capitalism into the kibutz. And some of the initiators of the changes hope to get a larger share of the kibutz inheritance when the veterans will die off & they will share out the remnants.

The kibbutzim were created to solve the problems of Zionist colonization by attracting student youth to the ideal of utopian socialist settlements. Utopian socialism, by definition, meant using philanthropic capital to fund idealistic true believers to establish pre-planned model societies. The Zionist movement has made this possible. Some added onto it Marxism, other groups added religion to the formula, some the values of A.D.Gordon. But all have maintained the same communal principles in practice.

In the second half of the 20th century Israeli society started to change & the kibbutzim refused to change with it, or changed only in details such as letting the children sleep with their parents. The kibbutzim became “rich” with splendid public spending & building. Food in the dining room was gourmet & free. But the personal spending money of the members was at a minimal level. The kibutznicks were the last in the country to get every household item you could name: Frigidaire, telephone, air-conditioning, & have not yet reached the car.

The children of the kibbutzim were mostly able & ambitious. They all went through the army where a majority among them became officers or commandoes. They saw no valid reason why they should become manual workers with a low income, like their parents for all their lives. It became obvious that Borochov’s upside-down pyramid is outdated. In the 90’s a wave of middle aged families & their children left the kibbutzim. They have figured out that with two average or better salaries they could double their income as compared to personal kibutz standards. And the kibbutzim have not only lost them but also had to pay them vast compensations. The mass exodus of its children has dealt the kibutz a severe blow. It has left many of them without leadership & managerial talent. Even worse was the emptying of the kibutz kindergartens & schools & loss of normal demographic age balance. The median age of many kibbutzim is over 50 years of age & it is not reduced by new births but only by the death of the elderly.

The poet Abraham Shlonsky once made a prophecy in a speech addressed to a kibutz convention in Tel Aviv: “Every generation rebels against its parents. I don’t envy the children of the kibutz movement - they will have to rebel against very good people!”

In the beginning I thought it right to struggle against the changes in our kibutz. Wait till we are dead! But it was a futile attempt. In the best case we will last for 10 more years of ceaseless struggle until we die out. What else is the perspective? Socialism has no future in this world. Revolutionaries who become conservatives are the modern version of Greek tragedy.