Seymour Melman Research Files on Israeli Kibbutzim

Seymour Melman (1918-2004), an economist who taught industrial engineering at Columbia, helped galvanize the antiwar movement from the 1950's on with analyses of the social costs of military spending, diverting resources from health care, public housing and education. He was a leading advocate of nuclear disarmament, and a longtime co-chairman of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. His later books, including After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Economy (2001), describe the potential of employee self-management, an idea that interested him for decades. As a young man, he briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel, and later in his career participated in studies and meetings on the productivity of such collective settlements.