Anarchy in the Arava

The last decades of the 20th century were not good times for the kibbutz movement. Economic crises, cold-hearted indifference from the state and exposure to the vagaries of ideological shifts both within their own membership and within wider society all contributed to the movement’s withdrawal to its present position on the periphery of Israeli social consciousness.

But although the kibbutzim are now widely seen as just one more failure in the history of utopian experiments, the process of privatisation and the erosion of their communalist ethos that began during the 1980s still continuing apace, the kibbutz idea is far from dead in Israel. As the main body of the movement drifted further and further from its anti-market ideals during the later half of the twentieth century, small groups of people began to leave the established kibbutzim to set up new communities as a reaction to what they saw as the ever more visible shortcomings of the kibbutz their parents had created. 

One of the earliest and most audacious of these projects was Kibbutz Samar, a small settlement in the Arava valley about 30km from Eilat. Samar was founded in 1976 by a group of kibbutz children seeking a solution to the problems that were by then subverting the kibbutz’s character as a free communal society. All of Samar’s founders were acutely aware of the alienation between the kibbutz member and the kibbutz establishment, the tyranny of the work roster and the subordination of the individual to the collective, and all had first hand experience how personal liberty was being swallowed up by ever-expanding webs of bureaucracy and increasingly authoritarian committees. Most kibbutz children of that generation saw exactly the same problems, but the majority believed that the authoritarian and humiliating kind of communalism that had come to characterise the kibbutz of the 1970s was an intrinsic feature of communal living. Many took the view that ‘if this is communalism, then we don’t want communalism any more’ and simply left the kibbutz, but the youngsters who founded Samar were adamant that it was possible to create a form of communal life that could reconcile community integration with individual autonomy, and they were determined to prove as much. 

Having worked out from experience of their parents’ kibbutzim that authority is the root cause of the humiliation and degradation of the human being, Samar’s founders set out to cancel every last element of traditional kibbutz living that involved the domination of one person by another. Eschewing the institutions, committees, formalised regulations, binding decisions and personal budgets that they felt stifled individual freedom on the established kibbutzim, they managed to create a settlement that functioned without any kind of hierarchical or authoritarian structures or formalised organisational institutions.

The social and political life of the settlement they built is based on voluntary acceptance of its decisions by each individual member without coercion or any kind of statutory sanctions. There are no real rules or regulations, and such administrative offices as exist there have been reduced in number “to an absolute minimum”. Harmonious social life is ensured solely by people voluntarily abiding by the socially defined norms out of a sense of responsibility towards the community. 

At well under 100 permanent members, Samar’s modest size and intimate nature allows for a system based on total trust, face-to-face democracy and mutual responsibility more or less exactly like that of the earliest kvutzot of the Second and Third Aliya. Active participation in the decision-making process is the norm, with the informal general meetings through which its decisions are made a far cry from the layers of bureaucracy that Samar’s members claim have strangled the established kibbutzim during their latter years. Perhaps more important than the general meetings, (which are sporadic to say the least), is the constant process of informal dialogue central to Samar’s life. A willingness to talk and to discuss everything openly was alive and kicking among the founding members even before their settlement came into being, and a culture of constant, organic conversation thus became a fundamental part of Samar’s existence. 

Samar’s income comes mainly from agriculture, a date plantation, a dairy and plant nurseries providing the kibbutz’s economic foundations, but this is a fluid and dynamic society open to economic diversification. If some-one has an idea for some new venture, he or she puts together an informal, ad hoc committee and does it. This has led to continuous experimentation with various new cooperative enterprises over the years with varying degrees of success. All property, including the means of production, is owned and controlled by the collective and economic decisions are made on a fully participatory basis. While the allocation of labour in the established kibbutzim is nowadays the responsibility of a nominated committee, Samar has no work roster. It’s up to the individual members to decide if, when, in what branch and for how long they work.

While communal consumption on the established kibbutzim has long taken the form of a collectively-dictated budget for each member, Samar’s members have revived the system used on the very earliest kvutzot – a common purse from which members are free to take as much as they think they need. Everyone takes what he or she wants from the kitty and nothing is written down. It’s worked fine for more than thirty years. 

Samar’s members have never called themselves anarchists. They didn’t set out basing their way of life on anarchism (or any other social theory for that matter), and the settlement they created has never called itself an anarchist kibbutz, yet it’s clearly not without some degree of justification that that’s precisely what it’s become known as. I first read about the community back in 2003 in an article by American writer Mike Liskin on the now sadly defunct Anarchist Communitarian Network website, in which the author noted how its way of life is in many ways a throwback to the “pure communal anarchism” of the Second and Third Aliya kvutzot. In his book The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia, Israeli journalist Daniel Gavron similarly described the settlement as “anarchy, but not chaos”. “After staying there for two weeks” wrote kibbutz author Eliyahu Regev in his article Samar and Me, “I dare to define Samar as an experiment that didn’t fail to maintain a communal society without authority”. 

When I visited Samar myself for the first time a couple of months ago I was pleased to see that nothing I’d read about this unique community was without foundation. The short time I spent there was time enough to understand that, in marked contrast to the rest of the contemporary kibbutz movement, Samar is well and truly flourishing. Not only did it manage to survive the economic crises of the ‘80s entirely unscathed, it was the only kibbutz that didn’t have to rely on government handouts to keep it afloat during the period of crisis, and it seems that while the kibbutz movement as a whole remains caught in the downward spiral of economic and social degeneration that began during that decade, Samar continues to go from strength to strength. 

Its demonstrable success begs a fresh look at the old question that’s raised time and time again when people talk about terms like ‘anarchy’ or ‘utopia’: when authority structures are removed and people given the freedom to do whatever they want, is it a good or a bad thing? It seems to me that the idea that people can build for themselves a society in which external authority is replaced by self-imposed limitations of conscience, morality and mutual respect, and of deep-rooted aspirations for belonging, solidarity and understanding, is born out at Samar, just as the idea that authority is conducive to social order continues to be disproved by the day-to-day experiences of outside society. Samar’s long history of achievements just goes to show how if creative, like-minded individuals with the vision and drive for human freedom can find each other and connect to each other, then it should by no means be beyond human capabilities to render the ‘necessary evil’ of government unnecessary. 

First published on Allvoices, May 10th 2008