Cross-posted from Eric Lee
(Note: Eric Lee posted this on his blog last week for Blog Action Day, where the subject was “inequality.”)
I lived in a place where everyone worked, but no one was paid for their work.
All the essentials of life were free — housing, health care, education, food, travel. Even daily newspapers, televisions and radios, even a kettle for making tea.
For the things that were not free, there were individual budgets specifically for things like holidays and clothing.
Where I lived, people worked in all types of jobs — in industry, agriculture and services. But it didn’t matter what you did, no one had more than anyone else.
When luxuries of different kinds became available, such as newer housing, or larger refrigerators, or colour televisions, they were allocated according to a system we all agreed was just — usually based on seniority.
The unpleasant but essential jobs were shared as well, so on weekends everyone had to be ready about once a month to do something different just to keep the place running. For example, every fourth Saturday, I milked cows, though my day job was to work as a computer programmer. (Cows don’t have weekends, and need to be milked every day.)
We raised our children together, from birth, in children’s houses. They spent their days there and their nights too, coming home to visit their parents from 16:00 to around 20:00 every day. To most parents, that time was devoted to their kids, so everyone left work in time to get their children home and maximize those four hours together.
We ate together in a common dining room, and food like everything else was provided without money — everyone took what they needed. We had a shared laundry too, and our clothes were washed and mended for us without charge, every day of the week.
I’ve never forgotten a conversation I had with the man who was, at the time, the elected head of the factory. When I asked him about being a manager he corrected me and said he was just a “coordinator”; we didn’t believe in managers. His office was one of the only places in the factory that had air conditioning, so on hot summer days he’d leave the door open so that everyone could see he wasn’t using it.
It was not a perfect society, and over the years many of its values eroded and were eventually lost.
But equality was at its core.
And not only equality, because there are societies in which there is a certain degree of that, but they’re not places you’d ever want to live. Another key value without which we’d have found this unbearable was democracy.
We voted on everything. We rotated managers (or “coordinators”) regularly, so no one stayed in a position of power for very long. We had weekly meetings of the entire community at which all important issues were settled. We had more than 50 committees which regulated every aspect of our common lives, including culture, health, education, political activity, running our local economy, and so on.
That unique combination of rather extreme forms of equality and democracy created the kind of society that Karl Marx once described with the phrase “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.
Though that phrase from The Communist Manifesto hardly described the societies which in the 20th century would call themselves communist, which were totalitarian hells, it very accurately described the place I lived.
So where was this egalitarian Utopia? A figment of my imagination? A dream?
No, it was very real and it was located in the shadow of Mount Tabor, in the lower Galilee region of Israel. The name of the community was Kibbutz Ein Dor, and for nearly 50 years, the description above fairly accurately describes how we lived there.
Ein Dor was part of a broader movement of more than 250 such communal settlements, all of which attempted to live according to these highly egalitarian and democratic values, with varying degrees of success, and for over 100 years. The kibbutz experiment was one of the longest and most successful attempts ever at the creation of a truly equal, socialist society.
Much of that is now gone, as the egalitarian and democratic values that underpinned the kibbutz model fell victim to a wave of “reforms” which have turned most of the kibbutzim into more ordinary, less equal villages.
But during their heyday, when I had the privilege of living there, there was no place in the world that was more equal.