ספר על כשל המחקר החברתי של התנועה הקיבוצית

מקצוע
מילות מפתח , , , , ,
שנת הגשה 2008
מספר מילים 117016
מספר מקורות 249

תקציר העבודה

מהפך בחקר הקיבוץ אמון ומנהיגות רמת-מוסר בשגשוג ושקיעת תרבויות דמוקרטיות הספר חושף את אי-הבנת החברה הקיבוצית בספרות העצומה שנכתבה עליה בשל הצלחת מאמצי מנהיגיה, בשיתוף פעולתם של חוקריה הדומיננטיים, להעלים את המציאות האוטוקרטית, ההייררכית, השמרנית והאוליגרכית במאות ארגוני-הפדרציה שלה (להלן: א"פים. למשל: התק"מ, סמינר הקיבוצים, מפעלים אזוריים), מקום שם חברי אליטות גבריות קידמו את מעמדם, יתרונותיהם ושליטתם. בהמשך וכחיזוק לממצאי ספר ביקורתי קודם, "אנטומיה של חולי ניהולי" (עם עובד, 1987) בו חשף המחבר, אנתרופולוג וחבר קיבוץ, את כשלי התרבות הרכושנית בא"פים, הספר הנוכחי מסכם שלושה עשורי מחקר בקיבוצים ובא"פים, ומוכיח שבמושגי הסוציולוג הידוע בורדייה (Bourdieu) נוצר בחברה זו שדה ארגוני מורכב ומרובד בו ננטש בהדרגה הרדיקליזם החברתי שאיפיין את הקיבוצים בתחילה, לצורך קידום אינטרסי מנהיגים ואליטות שליטות.
הספר חושף עיוורון מדהים של חוקרי הקיבוץ למציאותו עקב הימנעותם מחקירת הא"פים והתעלמותם מהפרקטיקות ירודות-המוסר שלהם שבאמצעותן צברו עסקנים הון בלתי-מוחשי, משאבים ויתרונות אחרים שהודות להם לרוב שלטו בפועל בקיבוצים, דיכאו חדשנים שיצרו פתרונות דמוקרטיים ושוויוניים מקדמי האתוס הקיבוצי, וגרמו לעזיבתם.       הספר מבוסס על עשרות שנות נסיונו של המחבר בתפקידי ניהול בקיבוץ ובמפעלו התעשייתי, ועל שלושת עשורי מחקר בקיבוצים שכלל: 1) אתנוגרפיות הן של א"פים, קיבוצים ומפעליהם מעוטי-האמון, האוטוקרטיים והאוליגרכיים, והן של קיבוצים ומפעליהם רבי-האמון, הדמוקרטיים והשוויוניים בלא שכירים; 2) חקר היסטוריות-חיים של מנהיגים רדיקלים שהמנהיגים הראשיים עודדו בתחילה ודיכאו אחר-כך; 3) מחקר היסטוריות המנהיגים ששרדו בשלטון בשיטות אוטוקרטיות ועל-ידי מפנה לשמאלנות מעריצת המשטר הטוטליטרי של ברה"מ נוגד האתוס והתרבות הקיבוציים.
       הספר נועד לסייע לחברי קיבוץ שמאמינים ברעיונו הרדיקלי ליצור פתרונות ארגוניים דמוקרטיים ושוויוניים לשיקום תרבותו הייחודית, ולאחרים הרוצים לקדם אמון, שוויון ודמוקרטיה בארגוני עבודה, שכן קידום האמון בין מנהלים למנוהלים הוא הסיכוי האמיתי להתגברות על חולאי הביורוקרטיה בארגונים המקובלים, כיון שהוא מגביר את הטיפוח והשימוש המוצלח בידע, מידע ומומחיות לטובת כלל חבריהם וסביבותיהם, כפי שמראה גם ספרות נרחבת שמצוטטת בספר.
תוכן העניינים
1. מבוא: הפרדיגמה השגויה של חקר הקיבוץ המקובל                                                       עמ'
1
2 . פרספקטיבה תרבותית של הקיבוץ                                                                              עמ'
1 3
3 . העדר תיאוריה טובה להסבר קיבוץ                                                                            עמ'
2 7
4 . העיוורון לריבוד הקיבוצי                                                                                          עמ'
4 0 5. טעויות ראשיות נוספות עקב התעלמות מהא"פים                                                          עמ' 49
6 . עליונות ראשי א"פים: קריירות צירקולטיביות, "הצנחות" ומעמד ”פעילים” שברירי            עמ' 61
7. עליונות ראשי א"פים: הרוטציה עודדה פטרונאז' וקליקות                                              עמ' 78
8 . הדמוקרטיה הפגומה בא"פים ופריבילגיות ה"פעילים"                                         עמ'
8 5
9. אמון, מוסריותם ותפקודם של מנהיגים                                                                        עמ' 96
1 0. "חוק הברזל": מנהיגים טרנספורמטיביים היו לשמאלנים שמרנים, מגיני-שליטתם  עמ' 105
1 1. עליונות, מעורבות ישירה מינימלית ומנהיגות לא-אפקטיבית                                          עמ' 119
1 2. חוסר מנהיגות רבת-אמון בקיבוץ רמה                                                                      עמ'
1 30
1 3. שמרנות מתגברת, פירוד האליטות וקונפליקטים הרסניים                                             עמ'
1 42
1 4. פטרונאז’ וירידה מוסרית של מנהיגים צירקולטיביים                                       עמ'
1 54
1 5. כרמלית: מנהיג משרת-עצמו שניכס את פרי יצירתיותם של אחרים                                 עמ'
1 69
1 6. פטרוני כוכב גבוהי-המוסר הפחיתו סתירה בין רוטציה ליצירתיות                                  עמ'
1 77
1 7. רוטציה, גודל והשפעות א"פים שליליות הרסו את היצירתיות                            עמ'
1 97
1 8. מסקנות וארגוני עבודה דמוקרטיים ברי-קיימא                                                           עמ'
2 18
מקורות                                                                                                                     עמ'
2 36
Recommendations
1 . The Israeli kibbutz is the world’s longest running experiment in alternative ways to structure democratic societies. As uniquely important as the kibbutzim are, surprisingly little has been written about them in English in recent years that is authoritative. The author corrects that shortcoming in this thorough account of eighty years of history and transformation of the kibbutzim. The book corrects many mistaken popular notions about the nature and practices of these communal societies. What is particularly useful for those who live in the capitalist democracies of Europe and North America is that the author shows how the learning from this great social experiment can be applied to our understanding of leadership and management of all organizations, including business corporations. The author writes with great passion and deep knowledge. Prof. James O’Toole, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA Marshal School of Business
2 . The author’s comprehensive testing of sociological methods in studies of egalitarian communes, disproves their findings hence, scares the utopist away. Scholars’ delusions and subsequently employment of misleading measures buttressed the veracity of “new [egalitarian] societies”.
Disrespect to unobtrusive divergence of rewards, owed to officeholders, set a few of the members distinguished in fringe benefits, power and status. Once officeholders learn to reset in power, the constitutional rights of comrades vary, letting a surreptitious power order strike a root. Rotational succession of officers proved a negative practice, aggravated power inequality and helped patrons’ continuity, ruining foundations of communal equality and direct democracy. Positivism, objectivity and authenticity of participant observers are therefore meditated anew. The author’s work is the first methodical sum up of some 70 years of sociologists’, anthropologists’ and historians’ attempts to fathom the kibbutz experiment, starting with Dr. S. Landshut (1938). Prof. Gideon M. Kressel, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Behavioral Sciences Department, and Head, The Institute for Social Research, Kiriat Sde Boker.   PREFACE AND RECOMMENDATION The Israeli communal settlements (kibbutz, pl. kibbutzim) were established a hundred years ago. The first communal settlement in Palestine, Kinneret, was founded in 1910 and is still a thriving community. It was the prototype of the kibbutz, a spearhead of the Zionist movement’s project to acquire land all over Palestine and to settle Jews on it. The policymakers of those days directed the socialist fervor of penniless young Jewish men and women emigrants toward a colonialist project. The Zionist Organization bought the land and supplied the funds for establishing the colonies, while the socialist pioneers provided the necessary manpower. The settlers labored to set up just and egalitarian communities for Jews, without much regard for the Arab peasants some of whom they had displaced. They were inspired by the ideal of a combined national and personal redemption, for which many of them were ready to sacrifice their own and their comrades’ and neighbours’ lives. The socialist ideology thus served to cover up both the injustice against exploited early pioneers and against dispossessed Arab peasants. During that century the kibbutz engendered a voluminous political, ideological and scholarly literature. Now comes the author and argues that most of these writings misunderstood essential aspects of the kibbutz. In particular, they did not treat the essentially non-democratic and unchanging higher echelons of kibbutz leaders and the numerous extraterritorial organizations and enterprises controlled by this elite. Nor did they fully grasp the fact that the kibbutz has never sought to set up a utopian society.
It has always been integrated in the wider society and shared many of its norms and beliefs. In the early days the kibbutzim depended on the Zionist Organization.
Its successor, the State of Israel, also supported the kibbutzim for extended periods. The total dependence of the early kibbutzim on external funding was a fundamental fact that no one disputed. But even after they had made considerable headway in the 1930s-1950s, they renewed treating the State of Israel as a milch cow. Yet in many accounts of kibbutzim this dependence was scarcely mentioned; it was overshadowed by the interest aroused by the egalitarian way of life. The anthropologists who studied the kibbutz were profoundly affected by the ideological statements of their interlocutors and, even more so, by the manner in which the socialist work ethos was translated into practice. Mel Spiro, author of the classic study Kibbutz:
Venture in Utopia candidly admits that he succumbed to the ideological pressure of the constantly reiterated emphasis on work (1963: 18). The national kibbutz leaders who controlled and manipulated this ideology remained outside the accounts, largely because they spent most of their time away from their home kibbutz. They worked from office buildings in Tel Aviv that were located in the vicinity of the government centre. These were the men who mediated the flow of state funds to the kibbutzim, negotiated state land and loans for kibbutz organizations, obtained state contracts for kibbutz industries and, no less important, committed quotas of kibbutz members for serving the interests of the Israeli Labor party and other national bodies.
In the above passage I use the word ‘men’ deliberately, for practically all the kibbutz leaders were men. Women were from the outset relegated to the ‘inferior’ services, as the income-creating jobs were reserved for the males. While some women worked in backbreaking manual tasks, such as road building and harvesting, most of them worked in the ‘unproductive’ kitchens, laundries, nurseries and schools. The impact of the external world on this sexual division of labor was unmistakable, and should have alerted the students of the kibbutz to its participation in the world. But it was consistently ignored in the research literature. A glaring example was Tiger and Shepher’s (1977) study of women in the kibbutz. They treated the kibbutz as a social isolate, which subscribed to a strict equality of the sexes. Yet they found that most women worked in the caring and educational services. Therefore they interpreted this peculiar division of labor simply as the outcome of biologically conditioned preferences of women.
The consternated reader may well ask: how can it be that three generations of kibbutz students missed the true nature of these phenomena, and only one scholar got it right? I argue that this may well be the case: It is not unusual, even in scholarly work, for totally misconceived mental constructs to persist. Just think of the way the tribe has since the days of Morgan (1877) been construed as the overarching and most inclusive unit of simple societies, and kinship – as their cornerstone. When Fried suggested in 1966 that tribes were not found in simple society, but were an element of state control (Fried 1968: 18), he set off a discussion that eventually led nowhere. The same happened to Schneider’s 1971 argument that “kinship … does not exist in any culture known to man” (Schneider 1984: vii); it was considered an interesting and provocative formulation that was discussed for a decade or more, and then consigned to oblivion. While both Fried and Schneider presented their arguments in convincing detail, they had in their lifetime little impact on anthropological theory and certainly did not cause a ‘paradigm change’.
Indeed, any scholar who, like The author, tries to change long-established academic conceptions must be prepared for a long uphill struggle that will not necessarily succeed.
The author was born and bred in kibbutz Gan Shmuel, has lived there most of his life, and while he teaches in Western Galilee College in Acre he and his family still reside in Gan Shmuel.
He is also deeply committed to the kibbutz way of life. Can such a person rise above the deeply engrained self-evident beliefs embodied in daily praxis, and critically examine his own community? The answer is not to be sought in The author’s undoubted capacity to distance himself from his situation, but rather in his burning desire to reform the kibbutz and make it again viable. This has been the energy driving a research project that has occupied his full attention for over thirty difficult years. His devotion to the kibbutz has not blinded him to its failings. There is an obstinate spirit in him that drives him to get to the root of matters, and the intellectual honesty to face up to unpalatable realities. In his search for the truth The author wrestles with the complex data and constantly revises and checks his arguments, sometimes producing a dozen or more drafts, till he is satisfied that he has got the right answers.
Both the academic community and the kibbutz members are deeply obliged to The author for having written this erudite and profoundly practical study.
Prof. Emanuel Marx Professor Emeritus Tel Aviv University Sociology and Anthropology Department