On Martin Buber’s Community Socialism and the Kibbutz

Abstract

On the premise of a critique of the dualistic philosophy of subject-object dichotomy as well as the instrumental community of capitalism, Martin Buber put forward a concept of new community based on the relationship between“I-you” and developed a theory of community socialism. When this theory met with kibbutz practice, the general contradiction between theory and practice was exposed, and the historical, specific and diverse nature of practice led to the revision and development of the original theory, which led to the formation of kibbutz socialist thought. Buber also became the philosopher who provided the strongest theoretical support for kibbutz community. Although the developed community socialist theory was adapted to a certain extent to kibbutz community, theory and practice were never unified, and Buber’s ideal community and the reality of the kibbutz were never the same thing. Judging from the trajectory of kibbutz development in present-day Israel, the experiment of Buber’s community socialist theory was actually a failure.