Chomsky and the Kibbutz

Here is an interesting audio interview from 1976 with Noam Chomsky, the famous American linguist and left-wing political critic, about anarchism—or what he calls "left-wing libtertarianism". "I myself think that the most dramatic example was the Israeli kibbutzim," he says, when asked for examples of communities successfully based on anarchist principles. (His discussion of the kibbutz's history begins at about 4:15 mark in the interview.)



In another interview, Chomsky talked about his early interest in the binational vision of the kibbutz movement:

This was 1947, and I had just turned eighteen. I was deeply interested, as I had been for some years, in radical politics with an anarchist or left-wing (anti-Leninist) Marxist flavor, and even more deeply involved in Zionist affairs and activities—or what was then called "Zionist," though the same ideas and concerns are now called "anti-Zionist." I was interested in socialist, binationalist options for Palestine, and in the kibbutzim and the whole cooperative labor system that had developed in the Jewish settlement there (the Yishuv), but had never been able to become close to Zionist youth groups that shared these interests because they were either Stalinist or Trotskyite and I always been strongly anti-Bolshevik.

He eventually stayed on a kibbutz for a few months in 1953 and had a positive experience of this spartan, egalitarian community:

The kibbutz where we lived, which was about twenty years old, was then very poor. There was very little food, and work was hard. But I liked it very much in many ways. Abstracting it from context, this was a functioning and very successful libertarian community, so I felt. And I felt it would be possible to find some mixture of intellectual and physical work. I came close to returning there to live, as my wife very much wanted to do at the time.