ANOTHER MAN: How could you make decisions democratically without a bureaucracy? I don't see how a large mass of people could actively participate in all of the decisions that need to be made in a complex modern society.


No, I don't think they can-I think you've got to delegate some of those responsibilities. But the question is, where does authority ultimately lie? I mean, since the very beginnings of the modern democratic revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it's always been recognized that people have to be represented-the question is, are we represented by, as they put it, "countrymen like ourselves," or are we represented by "our betters" ?

For example, suppose this was our community, and we wanted to enter into some kind of arrangement with the community down the road-if we were fairly big in scale, we couldn't all do it and get them all to do it, we'd have to delegate the right to negotiate things to representatives. But then the question is, who has the power to ultimately authorize those decisions? Well, if it's a democracy, that power ought to lie not just formally in the population, but actually in the population-meaning the representatives can be recalled, they're answerable back to their community, they can be replaced.

In fact, there should be as much as possible in the way of constant
replacement, so that political participation just becomes a part of everybody's life. But I agree, I don't think it's possible to have large masses of people get together to decide every topic-it would be unfeasible and pointless. You're going to want to pick committees to look into things and report back, and so on and so forth.18 But the real question is, where does authority lie?

MAN: It sounds like the model you're looking to is similar to that of the kibbutzim [collective farming communities in Israel].


Yeah, the kibbutz is actually as close to a full democracy as there is, I think. In fact, I lived on one for a while, and had planned to stay there, for precisely these reasons. On the other hand, life is full of all kinds of ironies, and the fact is-as I have come to understand over the years even more than I did at one time-although the kibbutzim are very authentic democracies internally, there are a lot of very ugly features about them.

For one thing, they're extremely racist: I don't think there's a single Arab on any kibbutz in Israel, and it turns out that a fair number of them have been turned down. Like, if a couple forms between a Jewish member of a kibbutz and an Arab, they generally end up living in an Arab village. The other thing about them is, they have an extremely unpleasant relationship with the state-which I didn't really know about until fairly recently, even though it's been that way for a long time.

See, part of the reason why the kibbutzim are economically successful is that they get a substantial state subsidy, and in return for that state subsidy they essentially provide the officers' corps for the elite military units in Israel.

So if you look at who goes into the pilot training schools and the
rangers and all that kind of stuff, it's kibbutz kids-that's the trade-off: the government subsidizes them as long as they provide the Praetorian Guard. Furthermore, I think they end up providing the Praetorian Guard in part as a result of kibbutz education. And here there are things that people who believe in libertarian ideas, as I do, really have to worry about.

You see, there's something very authoritarian about the libertarian structure of the kibbutz-I could see it when I lived in it, in fact. There's tremendous group pressure to conform. I mean, there's no force that makes you conform, but the group pressures are very powerful. The dynamics of how this worked were never very clear to me, but you could just see it in operation: the fear of exclusion is very great-not exclusion in the sense of not being allowed into the dining room or something, but just that you won't be a part of things somehow. It's like being excluded from a family: if you're a kid and your family excludes you-like maybe they let you sit at the table, but they don't talk to you-that's devastating, you just can't survive it. And something like that carries over into these communities.

I've never heard of anybody studying it, but if you watch the kids growing up, you can understand why they're going to go into the rangers and the pilot programs and the commandos. There's a tremendous macho pressure, right from the very beginning-you're just no good unless you can go through Marine Corps training and become a really tough bastard. And that starts pretty early, and I think the kids go through real traumas if they can't do it: it's psychologically very difficult.

And the results are striking. For example, there's a movement of resistersin Israel [Yesh G'vul], people who won't serve in the Occupied Territories--but it doesn't have any kibbutz kids in it: the movement just doesn't exist there. Kibbutz kids also have a reputation for being what are called "good soldiers"-which means, you know, not nice people: do what you gotta do.

All of these things are other aspects of it, and the whole phenomenon comes pretty much without force or authority, but because of a dynamics of conformism that's extremely powerful.

Like, the kibbutz I lived in was made up of pretty educated people-they were German refugees, and a lot of them had university degrees and so onbut every single person in the whole kibbutz read the same newspaper. And the idea that you might read a different newspaper-well, it's not that there was a law against it, it was just that it couldn't be done: you're a member of this branch of the kibbutz movement, that's the newspaper you read.

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Revolutionen består i att göra varje människa lika ädel och upplyst som en kung.