Kibbutz, Cooperation and the Issue of Embeddedness

The contemporary kibbutz is the best exemplification of the fifth and last stage of cooperative development envisaged by the Rochdale Pioneers when they opened their consumer store in 1844. This closeness to the modern cooperative movement at its birth, however, didn't contribute to a feeling of belonging to a "cooperative family". Throughout the years, despite its formal cooperative incorporation, the kibbutz considered itself as a meta-cooperative phenomenon. The idea that, being situated at the apex of a pyramid of levels of cooperative integration, might confer on the kibbutz the task of extending self-management - as a social resource - to other segments of society, never became part of its political-ideological agenda. On the other hand, the Israeli society seems to badly need alternatives to such prevailing patterns as over-consumption, selfinterest and profit-seeking. When properly understood and implemented, the cooperative model can offer a valid alternative by subordinating the economic component to the social one. The first is embedded in the latter, in a system which - by definition - remunerates participation rather than capital. It is argued that failure to see the kibbutz as part of a macro network of horizontal solidary links, prevented it from acting as an outward-oriented "change agent" of cooperation and possibly contributed to weaken its inner structure as a comprehensive all-village cooperative. Both levels - the micro local and the macro national - seem to be at a loss.