Complaint culture: the non-market economy and moral disappointment in a late-socialist kibbutz La culture des réclamations : économie non marchande et déception morale dans un kibboutz aux derniers temps du socialisme

Abstract

In recent years, the kibbutz – a once-idealized socialist commune in Israel – has become a common object of critique in Israeli popular culture. Many critiques focus on what can be described as the old kibbutz's ‘moral harshness’, highlighting the prevalence of informal surveillance, peer pressure, and public moralizing. While the kibbutz's ‘moral harshness’ is often attributed to excess ideological dogmatism that could have been avoided, the present article shows how it was a structural result of the kibbutz's non-market economy. Through a close reading of local kibbutz newspapers from the 1970s and 1980s, the article shows how in the kibbutz, the market's economic sanctions and incentives (prices, bonuses, and layoffs) were substituted by moral ‘sanctions’ and ‘incentives’ (complaints, criticism, and praise). Through this observation, the article makes two theoretical contributions. First, it contributes to the anthropology of ethics by demonstrating the connection between political economy and ‘meta-ethics’, showing how the elimination of the market expands the area of social life given to moral evaluation. Second, it contributes to recent anthropological discussions about anarchism and ‘post-capitalism’ by highlighting some of the challenges of organizing social relations outside the market.