Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The capitalist order of the post-war period has been responsible for growth in global household income, productivity, and innovation. At the same time, it has caused structural inequalities, exploitation, and the destruction of the ecosystem as direct/indirect outcome. To better understand how the current capitalist order can be combined or transformed with/through other ideas, we need to learn from decade old experiments. Kibbutz Samar is one of them. Situated in the southern Arava Valley of Israel, with 46 years of direct democratic organisation and one shared bank account amongst its 111 members, kibbutz Samar is a cooperative and egalitarian organised community that stands as unique among democratically organised intentional communities, and a clear outlier to the historical development of the Kibbutzim Movement in Israel. Studying Samar could offer avenues for adjusting the roles that individualism and autonomy play in our current social and economic systems. Tracing how members of kibbutz Samar have been modyfying an alternative socio-economic system to the traditional and the renewal kibbutzim, through anthropological fieldwork this research will be look the interactions between direct democracy, sharing economy, sufficiency, and the possibilities for social-ecological transformation. This long-term ethnographic study aims to deepen our understanding of previous research about Samar’s particular kind of egalitarian governance and how far its social and economic principles can embed sustainably and ideologically within the globalised world economy.