Rethinking reverence for Stalinism in the kibbutz movement

Prolonged Dysfunction of Ex-Trusting Transformational Leaders and Its Amoral Camouflage by Charismatic Postures

“…Each leader democratically suppressed Leftism in his respective movement by lengthy debates aimed at gaining followers' trust; these debates lacked any sign of leaders' adoration, and Leftists were expelled after long debates and approval by a vote of kibbutz members, with no charismatic leader fiats (Near, 1992: pp. 140-143;Tzachor, 1997: p. 153;Shapira, 2016a).…”

“…Howell and Shamir (2005: p. 107) proposed that "the more the leader felt empowered, the more he or she will engage in charismatic behaviors, such as displaying self-confidence and presenting a challenging vision," but likewise can self-empower a past transformational leader who had weakened due to dysfunction in accord with LLCT (Leadership Life Cycle Theory); a charismatic image can help her/him defend power: by adopting a challenging vision, preferably of a distant and secretive seemingly successful organization/polity, such leaders display a charismatic image, using authoritarian practices legitimized by this example to camouflage their self-perpetuating conservatism, suppressing ascending talented innovators (Beilin, 1984;Rifkin & Harrar, 1988: Ch. 10;Shapira, 2016a). Such a vision of an extreme ideology may empower a leader by radically changing followers' cosmic worldview:…”

Co-Opted Biased Social Science: 64 Years of Telling Half Truths about the Kibbutz

“…However, functionalists continued; for instance, as was depicted in, 1975 two of them vehemently denounced Kressel's seminal ethnography that untangled the oligarchization of Kibbutz Netzer Sireni [110] [111]. Then Kibbutz Research Institute studied kibbutz plants but not studied oligarchization in these kibbutzim (personal knowledge [90] [136], but the dominant coalition ignored critiques and this helped ultra-conservative, loyalists without critical thinking succeed the old guard and worsen implementation of its outdated policies in accord with Hirschman [31], such as establishing 21 new kibbutzim without proper financing, adding superfluous debts [100] which together with a new hostile governmental economic policy in, 1985 more than doubled debts yearly, and the kibbutz system collapsed [137].…”

“…However, leaders' low-moral self-perpetuating efforts commenced in, 1937-9 by the two urging reverence of Stalinism which contradicted kibbutz egalitarianism and Israeli democratic culture, legitimizing centralized control, autocracy, and censorship of publications ( [88] [89] p. 178; [90] I-KOs, were integral to the success of kibbutz society [45] [54] but canonic research evaded their study because it would have exposed a conformist sector of a radical society whose practices violated its principles [73] [76] [78] [97]. Such exposure of anti-kibbutz practices would have ruined the radical kibbutz image; hence, leaders opposed it and researchers acquiesced: While hundreds studied kibbutzim and produced over 5000 publications, 3 only five studied I-KOs rather recently, all except for me without such exposure [45] [100].…”

“…Worse still, new generation leaders criticized Movements' undemocratic and non-egalitarian practices, objected to reverence of Stalinism, and called for a leadership reshuffle. These young leaders were suppressed, sidetracked, and/or left [90]- [92], but even these events did not move students to study suppressing prime leaders and loyalist I-KO power elites. According to Kuhn [129] the sticking to paradigms disproved by new findings is a common scientific problem.…”