Page 48 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - Winter 20
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recovered from that previous ordeal of MY QUIET REBELLION – FOR
schlepping the bananas. By the end of the
morning, I returned these two empty sacks to SOCIAL JUSTICE
the store, having somehow managed to cover
the entire field. DAVID CHESTER
he Socialist aspects of our Movement
I was rather anxious: Had I spread the seed T
correctly and what would be the result of this have always been questionable to my
labour? Would the birds get to these seeds mind. Even before I joined our
before they could begin to germinate? Later Movement, I had learned of what struck me
in the day, I saw that other kibbutzniks were as a better way for achieving social justice.
bringing aluminium water pipes and water- Not that I seriously expected anybody in
sprinklers to that place and connecting them Habonim to be interested in it at the time –
to a permanent pipeline. A few rows of these yet, it has remained in my mind all these
sprinklers were soon at work wetting the soil. years. And more recently, I have included a
small part of this material in my book on
The evidence of this activity was not long in theoretical macroeconomics, because it is a
showing itself. About two days later, when I significant aspect of how to explain properly
was again passing that field, I was delighted (in general) the actual working of the social
to see small, uniformly spaced, tiny green system of macroeconomics.
blades of grass covering all of that most
arable of surfaces. I had heard that this silage As a young student in engineering, it was
grass grows very fast and that, in the good suggested that I might be interested in
and sunny conditions in Israel, it can be cut economics too. Indeed, at that time, the
and used as fodder for the cows, 5 or 6 times London Tube-trains and buses carried
during the entire year. advertisements offering one the chance to
“Be Your Own Economist”, and the school
from which this was declared promoted a 10-
week evening course on this very subject in
several London boroughs. What the school
failed to indicate, until one got more
seriously involved, was that the kind of
economics they taught was based on the
writings of an American self-taught
economist, one Henry George, who lived in
th
the 19 century and became famous for his
classic book, “Progress and Poverty”,
published in 1879.
The question that George asked was this:
“How is it that with so much technological
progress being made (for even in his day the
Industrial Revolution had made many
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