The Ashkenazi Revolution

274His victories are in the realm of printed material and no more. In the finalanalysis, they are imaginary victories.7In this book, the author avoids dealing with economic issues. The reasonfor this is the shocking transitoriness of economic criteria, the existence ofexcellent specific economic methods and Israel’s increasing dependenceupon the world economy, a dependence that will automatically force us intopaths and methods that will ensure the nation its place as a successfulexporting nation. The only economic point that the author wishes to touchupon is the one that concerns the non-kibbutz economy of the LaborFederation. The author wishes to present a simple question concerning thiseconomy: Who will need this economy in the future? Members of theFederation, who are not members of a kibbutz, are 99 percent petitbourgeois who promote moderate capitalism. What use, however, is asocialist economy to the petit bourgeois? There was once faith that aneconomy that was controlled by the Federation would ensure the existenceof a socialist society, which is what the founders of the Federation saw astheir primary purpose. But it has been proven that ownership of aneconomy does not determine the character of a society. The religiouspeople of Jerusalem and B’nei Brak, consider material possessions to beunimportant, but they possess a wonderful society. Lehi had a wonderfulsociety at a time when its members hungered for bread. The society of thesecond migration was a unique one, even though it lacked material assets.Today’s Federation has tremendous assets, but its society continuallydecays. The path of the Federation proved that assets do not build asociety, so why does it have assets? The choice that the State of Israel ispresented with is between a capitalism that seeks penance for its sins andstrives to avoid being exploitative, and a deviant socialism that winks atcapitalism and copies its ways. The first possibility is the better one. Acapitalist who disperses, in the twilight of his days, his millions forcharitable causes, as he atones for his sins, is a much more admirable manthan a socialist activist who cursed capitalism his whole life and, in the end,bought a bunch of stocks and began to warm his heart to the capitalistic