take notice that all of the info you provided is post-1948 info, which i specifically said, for good reason, does not count. the State of Israel changed a lot of things for the kibbutzim for the worse:

"The kibbutz is a miniature communist society, where in principle all wealth is common property. This has however changed over time, especially since the establishment of Israel in 1948."

"1909: The first kvutzah is founded in Deganya in Palestine.
Around 1920: The kibbutz movement becomes central to the Jewish labour movement.
Around 1930: There comes a split in the kibbutz movement, into a radical faction wanting to form a countrywide commune, and a moderate that wanted to continue with single kibbutzes that should cooperate with the rest of the society.
1948: When the state of Israel is formed, the kibbutzes lose much of their importance in integrating Jewish immigrants in the Jewish communities.
1968: Some kibbutzes start employing Arab labour, mainly due to labour shortages in the fast growing Jewish economy."

http://i-cias.com/e.o//kibbutz.htm

"the members of the Third Aliya were to the left of the founders of Degania, and believed that voluntary socialism could work for everyone. They considered themselves to be a vanguard movement that would inspire the rest of the world.

Degania in the 1910s seems to have confined its discussions to practical matters, but the conversations of the next generation in the 1920s and 1930s were free-flowing discussions of the cosmos. Instead of having a meeting in a dining room, meetings were held around campfires. Instead of beginning a meeting with a reading of minutes, a meeting would begin with a group dance. Remembering her youth on a kibbutz by the Sea of Galilee, a woman remembered "Oh, how beautiful it was when we all took part in the discussions, [they were] nights of searching for one another—that is what I call those hallowed nights. During the moments of silence, it seemed to me that from each heart a spark would burst forth, and the sparks would unite in one great flame penetrating the heavens…. At the center of our camp a fire burns, and under the weight of the hora the earth groans a rhythmic groan, accompanied by wild songs."[5]

Kibbutzim founded in the 1920s tended to be larger than the kibbutzim like Degania which were founded prior to World War I. Degania had had twelve members at its founding. Ein Harod, founded only a decade later, began with 215 members.

Altogether kibbutzim grew and flourished in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1922 there were scarcely 700 individuals living on kibbutzim in Palestine. By 1927 the kibbutz population was approaching 2,000. By the eve of World War II the kibbutz population was 25,000, 5% of the total population of the yishuv, while in 1950 they grew up to 65,000, 7.5% of the population. However, because of major crises in the two largest kibbutz movements that became leftists in the late 1940s (see below), there was mass attrition and growth almost stopped until the 1960s when it renewed up to the 1989 when population reached the peak of 129,000.

The kibbutzim grew up as three main movements organized as federations in 1927-1929 with different ideologies and practices, but the differences between kibbutzim were always smaller than their similarities. In 1927 was established the mainstream movement known as "United Kibbutz", or "'Kibbutz Hameuhad" that consisted some half of the kibbutzim. Some new kibbutzim that had been founded by youth of HaShomer Hatzair who banded together to form another countrywide association, Kibbutz Artzi which consisted some 30% of kibbutzim. In 1936, the Kibbutz Artzi Federation founded its own political party called the Socialist League of Palestine but generally known as Hashomer Hatzair. It merged with Hakibbutz Hameuchad left-wing party to become Mapam once the state of Israel was established. Mapam was a leftist party that revered the Soviet Union, a policy adopted by main leaders Tabenkin of Kibbutz Meuchad and Yaari of Kibbutz Artzi in order to preserve their rule [6]

In 1928 Kibbutz Degania and other small kibbutzim formed together a group called "Chever Hakvutzot", the "Association of Kvutzot." Kvutzot kibbutzim deliberately stayed under 200 in population. They believed that for collective life to work, groups had to be small and intimate, or else the trust between members would be lost. Kvutzot kibbutzim also lacked youth-group affiliations in Europe.

The Kibbutz Meuhad accused Artzi and the kvutzot of elitism. Hameuhad criticized Artzi for thinking of itself as a socialist elite, and they criticized the kvutzot for staying too selective and small. Hameuhad kibbutzim took in as many members as they could. Givat Brenner eventually came to have more than 1,500 members.

Artzi kibbutzim were also more devoted to equality of the sexes than other kibbutzim. A 1920s, 1930s era kibbutz woman would call her husband ishi—"My man"—rather than the usual Hebrew word, ba'ali, which literally means "My owner." They were also characterized by the "common education" where children were raised in common dormitories and stayed at their parents' home only a few hours a day.

There were also differences in religion. Kibbutz Artzi and Kibbutz Meuchad kibbutzim were secular, even staunchly atheistic, proudly trying to be "monasteries without God." Most mainstream kibbutzim also disdained the Orthodox Judaism of their parents, but they wanted their new communities to have Jewish characteristics nonetheless. Friday nights were still "Shabbat" with a white tablecloth and fine food, and work was not done on Saturday if it could be avoided. Only late some kibbutzim adopted Yom Kippur as the day to discuss fears for the future of the kibbutz. Kibbutzim also had collective bar mitzvahs for their children."

"Another dispute occurred solely over ideology. Israel had been initially recognized by both the USA and the Soviet Union. For the first three years of its existence, Israel was in the Non-Aligned Movement, but David Ben-Gurion gradually began to take sides with the West. The question of which side of the Cold War Israel should choose created fissures in the kibbutz movement. Dining halls segregated according to politics and a few kibbutzim even saw Marxist members leave. This controversy cooled once Stalin's cruelty became better known and once it became clear that the Soviet Union was systematically anti-Semitic. The disillusionment particularly set in after the Prague Trials in which an envoy of Hashomer Hatzair in Prague was tried in an anti-Semitic show trial.

Yet another controversy in the kibbutz movement was the question over Holocaust reparations from West Germany. Should kibbutz members turn over income that was the product of a very personal loss? If Holocaust survivors were allowed to keep their reparation money, what would that mean for the principle of equality? Eventually, many kibbutzim made this one concession to inequality by letting Holocaust survivors keep all or a percentage of their reparations. Reparations that were turned over to the collective were used for building expansion and even recreational activities."

and here's an interesting passage that can better explain why people left the kibbutzim -- reasons that did not involve the social and psychological reasons you listed:

"With a changing of the generations in the kibbutzim societies, several wide changes occurred in the structure and culture of the kibbutzim. In general, the process could be described in which a significantly weakening happened to the different communal characteristic.

With time, the kibbutz members’ sense of identification with the kibbutz and its goals significantly decreased. This process originated both from personal frustrations among the kibbutz members which development as a result of internal processes which happened in the kibbutz, and from the growing stratification and inequality of kibbutz society because of the capitalistic cultures of inter-kibbutz organizations headed by kibbutz elite members and capitalistic cultures adopted by many kibbutz factory managers who followed the lead of the former elite.[9] In addition, over the years some of the kibbutz members made professional careers outside the kibbutz and followed the norms of capitalist society and much like the two former elites also accumulated power, privileges, prestige and other capitals by which some of them or the former elites ruled over the kibbutzim and made their democracy largely ineffective"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz#History

no. why would i agree to that?

lol you even said that our current society (referring to the US), like Spain prior to the Spanish Revolution, was corporatist. the US is one of the foremost capitalist nations in the world today. don't contradict yourself. i didn't say that it was anarcho-capitalist, i said it was capitalist.

and here's the quote lol.

wow, that's a bold assertion backed with no facts if i ever saw one.

also, if we shall disregard Native Americans as a good example on our part, maybe we should get rid of most of your examples of anarcho-capitalism in the past. after all, Medieval Iceland, the Wild West, and all other pre-industrial societies cannot fairly be counted for they do not account for the large corporations that sprung out of the industrial revolution that constitute my biggest strife with anarcho-capitalist thought. there is no way large corporations would be done away with in an anarcho-capitalist society.

btw, this "Tragedy of the Commons" you speak of is ironic. a very similar tragedy occurs at the hands of corporations. in Iceland, the fish supply, their main source of wealth for centuries, has been seriously depleted, not by the "Tragedy of the Commons", but by commercial fishing. there was a documentary that i was watching that discussed this but i cannot seem to find it. the doc i watched was called "Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City", but the videos i'm finding online are very different from the doc i remember watching. here's a short article discussing the traumatic effects of commercial fishing, including those which i have described:

http://www.fishinghurts.com/EnvironmentalConcerns.asp

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erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

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They didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using . . . . What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.

So much for Rand's “libertarianism”, not to mention respect for property rights. Property rights are for “white” folks it seems.

Monopoly = success of capitalistic mentality.
People aren't seeing this from the largest perspective. Capitalism is essentially the common pattern of evolution. Both exploit that which is most useful to maintain survival. The result is extreme waste and suffering. Capitalism seeks to exploit whatever is most profitable thus making the object of profit most useful. And everyone tries to find the most profitable object of profit. It's a race to the top. The natural gravitation of such a process is the elimination of all competition to be the last man standing, because the last man standing knows he's safe. That last man seeks to subjugate all things including people because people then become the subjects of his profit. Hmmm, sound like something familiar? It sounds much like the order of nature. Natural selection exploits the genes most useful to produce the strongest species to overcome and flourish to produce offspring and continue the reproduction of genes. But natural selection is blind, and it works for all species. And all these species clash to be the most fit and emergent. The goal of an evolutionary process is to produce a species that triumphs over all others and subjugates all other species for the triumphant species' use. It is a blind chaotic and absurd system. It is exactly what a cold black universe will produce. And capitalism is simply an extension of that process that has been institutionalized in the common process of society. So we have a constant clash of forces that seek the top spot, meanwhile producing ridiculous waste and suffering, just like in the wild.

And money has become the object of obsession, making the process everlasting and virtually undefeatable. Because no longer are we competing directly for resources. We are instead directly competing for money which becomes the gate-way to the resources we seek. So we become detached from the realness of the process. It allows for a complete social insanity, which is what we have here today. An insanity that follows the same blind chaos that is found in the wild.

Cooperation, however, is the intellectual and rational path to eliminate such a tragedy.

Capitalism is a quasar, and it sucks the whole world in. It's final result: annihilation. Just like in nature, capitalism is full of annihilating factors. Because, no one sat down and planned out existence and the order of nature. It developed on its own devoid of any consciousness or rational intent. So everything will naturally annihilate itself. Capitalism developed abiding by the same principle. (I almost don't even want to call it "capitalism," I'd rather call it the "natural order," *which is a bad thing by the way*). It's as irrational as religion is, but more destructive.

If humanity ever escapes capitalism, it surely will look back and cringe in disgust at what a primitive and wasteful shit streak it was in humankind's time-line.

I've found that defenders of capitalism usually are people who haven't followed a liberal education, so they are without many of the essential humanistic and holistic qualities of such an education. They haven't been exposed to enough to make well founded judgments. And that is why they support a ludicrous system such as capitalism.

BUT, something like the Venus Project can also eventually be achieved through an anarchistic revolution. But the process would be much much slower.

As an institution, it perpetuates the "natural tragedy" and prevents progressive change. As a system of conduct, it reinforces the primitiveness of competition and extends the destruction of all things that aren't human (humans too actually). It has a ludicrous anthropocentric reductionist attitude that focuses on needless goals and fueled by vainful superficial ambitions that will always create annihilation. (capitalistic economics might I remind you)

"The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people." (Wealth of Nations Book 1, chapter V)

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erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_the_labour_theory_of_value

The labor theory of value is essentially price fixing. Price fixing just doesn't work. People have tried but people end up ignoring it lol.

no, i read that. and no, i didn't just read the LTV wiki. i've been studying LTV for a little while now. here's one of the criticisms there, which is hardly a valid criticism, and it is the extent of the section titled "Inapplicability of LTV":

"The LTV is a theory of capitalist production, or generalized commodity production. There are however, commodities bought and sold under capitalism which have a price even though they do not have a value."

before i present the rest of this, this is the just of what the section is about. so basically, it is an argument that LTV isn't applicable in a capitalist environment because it doesn't account for things that have no value (as in the commodity's natural demand [demand if given away for free] does not exceed it's natural supply) yet have a price. i agree. it doesn't apply because (at least using mutualism, syndicalism and/or PARECON as your basis) with LTV, if something has "no value" (in the sense i have previously defined it) it should not have a price. after all, what economics is supposed to be is the science of the allocation of scarce goods. however, capitalists have turned it into the allocation of scarce goods with the benefit of profit for those with property rights over said goods. LTV, in the form i see it, can directly represent work in order to fairly and naturally allocate money which represents said labor and allows the laborer direct control over his labor to purchase goods equal in value (natural price adjusted for the amount of demand in excess of supply; scarcity) to his or her labor. resources and labor would be completely separate, money only having it's value through labor directly, with natural resources only finding their value through scarcity and collectively labored resources (resources that have been produced through labor at a factory, shop, restaurant, etc. that have been voluntarily surrendered by the laborers of the product in exchange for money which they will have received from their labor union) also finding their value in scarcity. however, individually labored resources will work on a simple barter system where prices will be determined by the individuals making the trade. through this system a natural equilibrium will be met and labor will be directly represented without the inconvenience of interests, profits, rents, or usury. what this quite literally translates to is the creation of products through labor in exchange for scarce goods.

without further ado, here's the rest of the passage:

""Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honour, &c., are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an object may have a price without having value. The price in that case is imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may sometimes conceal either a direct or indirect real value-relation; for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which is without value, because no human labour has been incorporated in it." (Capital Volume 1, section 1)[3]"

my simple response to this would be, why should such commodities hold value if they are not scarce, nor have they been labored? we say that land, for example, has a price but not a value, but what reason is there for this other than to allow someone to profit; exploitation at it's finest? this is capitalism at it's essence, for capital, by definition, is profit without labor which can only be achieved through exploitation.

and the rest is only a list of exceptions to the above, so i need not delve into it.

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erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

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i've been studying this a bit for a while now and my position has kind of changed. i think i had initially misunderstood LTV. i think you are simplifying it here a bit too much, but that is besides the point. here are some of the notes from the economic theories i've been building. maybe this will make it more clear what i am trying to do (as a forewarning, though i have reorganized these quite a bit, they are still just random scattered notes i've been piecing together slowly and so this might be a bit hard to read, but hopefully you'll be able to makes heads or tails of it):

My overall goal is to build a society in which voluntarism is maximized and coercion limited to it's greatest possible extent in every facet of existence, while simultaneously increasing both productivity and economic, political and social equality for all humans, in essence collapsing all hierarchy and unnecessary (that which hasn't met the burden of proof to justify it's existence) authority.

let me begin by defining some terms:

-Natural supply - supply of a resource prior to it's consumption (taking into account it's rate of depletion and replenishment).
-Natural demand - the amount of an item demanded prior to it being given value in currency (price); wants and needs are maximized.
-Cost adjusted demand - the demand of a product after it is given a price (in my ideal society, this would be based on the product's scarcity); wants become limited, but needs should never be encroached upon.
-Demand adjusted supply (should not exist. Only exists in an exploitative society) - supply that is limited artificially due to the amount demanded.
-Need - amount of a product that society must consume regardless of supply in order to maintain.
-Want - amount of demand in excess of need.
-Scarcity - a state in which natural demand exceeds natural supply.

Around the time of my introduction to anarchism, a family friend (who was a typical American conservative) told me a story that he claimed was what really happened during the first Thanksgiving. He told me of the early years of European inhabited America in which the pilgrims lived communally. He claimed that the pilgrims would organize a big feast one day of every year in which everyone would hunt and harvest together and collect food so that they could cook and eat on the day of the big feast. According to him, this was inefficient, and they often ended up running out of food because people realized that someone was going to handle the work for them and they had no need to be productive because they would still get a chance to eat. Apparently one year they finally decided to do something different. The pilgrims then were forced to realize that they had to fend for themselves or starve. With this new system in place there was a surplus of food left over, so the pilgrims shared the food they had harvested among each other. This was the largest meal they had eaten since docking in the colonies. This was the beginning of Thanksgiving. Unfortunately for my family friend, he believed that he was giving me an argument to support capitalism. What he didn't realize is that he was really arguing for individualism. The issue I find with most peoples' thinking is that two things are automatically assumed, the first that capitalism is synonymous with individualism, and the second being that individualism and socialism are mutually exclusive. While it is true that, as my family friend's story pointed out, individual means of production lead to high levels of productivity, his story also subconsciously realizes another significant factor that is all too commonly neglected; a factor that proves individualism and socialism are not mutually exclusive, but rather they are actually complementary: mutual aid. As Pyotr Kropotkin discovered, mutual aid is actually a factor of evolution which is a fact of life that, as theorized by Charles Darwin, was known for being about survival of the fittest; a very self-interested concept. The reason, Kropotkin noted, that mutual aid, which is the simple concept of forming social bonds between individuals for the purpose of assisting each other, factored into evolution was ironically a result of this self-interested concept. After all, it is in the best interest on many occasions of the individual to ask for assistance, and in order to expect this assistance, one must assist in return. The irony of my family friend's story is that what he described is a perfect example of individualism (which he mistook for capitalism) working in perfect harmony with socialism in the form of mutual aid.

Egoism is a necessary preset of economic prosperity, however, mutual aid is a necessary preset of egoism, for to achieve maximum possible personal prosperity, one must join a society, rely on the assistance of those in their surrounding society, and, inversely, assist those in their society if they expect further assistance. If one labors for self without seeking the assistance of others or assisting others him/herself, he or she may be able to self-sustain, but will find it difficult without at least minimal assistance from others to produce beyond these means. What I propose is a rather high level of self-interest, if not virtually absolute self-interest. However, rather than being an opponent of self-interest, as many assume, mutual aid is actually the backbone; maximum self-interest, being the cause of maximum labor and, by extension, maximum production, is not achievable in a system in which mutual aid is not realized. Additionally, mutual aid cannot be maximized without true economic equality being possible for every human. Such equality must be met by an individual voluntarily; One must not be coerced to be equal if they wish to work harder than others or not work as hard.

In essence, people labor because many, if not most products (goods and services) are scarce, and in order to gain access to scarce products one must excavate them for themselves, labor in exchange for them, or trade in exchange them. For this purpose, and as, at root, all trades are subsequent to some sort of labor, logic follows that currency, rather than being fiat money or money backed by products of labor, should be directly backed by labor itself; labor should create currency.

It then follows that products should only hold value in currency if they are scarce, and when it is deemed that a product is scarce (by scientists constantly keeping account of census information, productivity levels, amount of labor being performed in exchange for money, natural supply, depletion rates, rates of replenishment, new technology, etc.), said product should only have it's price raised to account for scarcity. This will make the scarce product worth more labor and one of four circumstances may result: the product, if not at all needed and it's overall natural demand low enough, will no longer be demanded at all or be demanded very little and so, logically, it's production/excavation should be discontinued; the product will no longer be wanted in excess of it's need (or will barely be wanted in excess of it's need) and so new methods of increasing the supply should be sought out and considered due to the relative inelasticity of it's demand which would subsequently lead people to labor harder, more frequently and for longer periods of time depending on how dependent on said product they are, in effect creating more currency and driving prices upward; the product's demand will be dropped with a slight excess still existing of demand beyond need and so no action need be taken as demand will take it's natural downward course and again fall below supply, assuring that said product will no longer be scarce for the time being; or the product will have demand well in excess of need, though not in excess of supply, and so no action need be taken for the same reasons as the previous situation. It should also be noted that a previously scarce product, through new discoveries, due to scientific evaluation, may be found to no longer be scarce and vice versa.

Currency will be created by labor in the form of vouchers (which, in this day and age, may be better allocated as virtual vouchers which are kept account of through a voucher card) as they would not circulate unless used in the medium of trade, but rather end at a collective-bank-sponsored (to pay the workers), union-backed (to assure they get paid a fair amount) organization in which scarce products -- created and surrendered voluntarily by laborers who, in exchange, have been compensated for their work by the collective bank -- will be purchased at a price that will assure that demand does not exceed supply.

When contracts are protected they allow for the enforced subordination of one person to another. One may erect a contract but it should not be enforced by any judiciary system in any way. This will make hiring an insecure practice, making collective work by far the most secure and profitable mean of income and forcing individuals who want houses built, for example, to consult a union to send masons who will then generate their own revenue by laboring to create the house.

Such a simple concept -- the refusal to enforce the right of contract -- will help end the exploitation of the wage system.

Ending the enforcement of contract is also pivotal in putting an end to property rights; if one cannot contract to legal title of land, he/she may not hold a monopoly over it, nor may he or she claim the fruits of its natural resources if they are necessary for the commonwealth of humanity.

People do not see property for the double edged sword that it is; on one hand, in most civilized nations today, all human liberties stem from the right to own property, yet on the other hand, it is from property that all forms of oppression arise; are the people not the property of the king in a monarchy? Are the workers not the property of bosses during work hours by contract in capitalism? And this leads to the most important question of all: is it possible for society to function -- for liberties to be had -- without ensuring property rights? This question and it's answer are the most telling of all.

Forced economic equality is but equality of circumstance; what I propose is equality of opportunity. What of the individual who prefers only to work infrequently and is willing to accept that he or she will live off of limited resources? Should such an individual be forced to labor as much as others in order to maintain a synthetic economic egalitarianism? Would such a system not be just as authoritative if not more so than a capitalist system?

A business is a type of organization, but not all organizations are necessarily businesses.

Society needs to be open to the possibilities of post-scarcity in the same way a cosmologist needs to be open to the possibility of the existence of a God.

Using such a theory, one, in essence, by laboring, is literally creating currency.

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erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

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So tell me if I get what you're trying to say:

Basically a central organization is price fixing.

lol nah, i figured i'd share my notes with everyone. i'm working on compiling a book on economics and this is part of it.

and yes, i guess you can say that about kind of. it's not so much central organization though (however, i am completely against central organization). it's more that the enforcement of right, rather than a prevailing justice (and not in a legal sense), is allowing for such things as price fixing, among others, which makes the opportunity for equality of wealth a bit skewed.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

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