Workers' Holiday in an Accidental Utopia

Today has been a rather Soviet day, in both the negative and positive sense of the term.

First, the negative: Today, at the ranch, we staged a "subotnik." The Soviet word (and no, I don't mean "Russian") "subotnik" has a special meaning. "Subotnik" is a perversely diminutized word for Saturday. ("Subota" means "Saturday".) Subotnik kind-of means "little Saturday-thing," but what it actually meant in Soviet life, as it were, was "a Saturday when everyone in the plant has to come to work, and work for free." Apparently these endeavors were "collectively" proposed phenomena, where some commie party-leader in the plant - or collective farm, or warehouse, etc - would say, "I know - how 'bout we all come into work on Saturday and work without pay and give the proceeds to our brothers in Cuba," or something along those lines, and none of the normal people in the workplace would say "No," because they valued relative-freedom and relative-employment. So everyone would have to - or rather everyone would be privileged to - come to work for free on Saturdays - not every Saturday, but occasionally.

Today, our subotnik was focused around the fact that we have company coming tomorrow, so the whole weekend is about cleaning the house. There is some party-talk, on such days, about two hours of intensive cleaning followed by freedom for all for the remainder of the day, but of course, that's a somewhat preposterous fantasy. Anyone who has seen our house knows that.

A more kibbutzy workaround might be to say, "I know, how 'bout somebody takes the young'uns off the compound for the day, while the other one cleans the place." (On kibbutzim, the young children are apparently collectively day-cared so that everyone else can harvest figs, etc.) Of course, this is the only viable division of labor, but it's not what we did. Needless to say, I volunteered to be the one to take the children off the kibbutz, to some museum, but our compound is more collective-farmish than kibbutzy, so we all labored together.

But now for the positive side of Soviet Saturday: the collective was truly collective (unlike the actual USSR), and the party never stopped. I'm apparently a highly popular man-about-house, so the fun followed me wherever I worked. If I leaned over at any task, the other workers liked to try to climb on my shoulders. Cleaning Bunny's cage turned into the general battle for possession of the white-handled broom, followed by a general holiday for rabbit and guinea pig alike. Cleaning the kitchen floor was a struggle for mastery of the sponge-mop: Daniel wanted in the worst way to mop, and so he did. No matter where I went, the there was fun and an insuppressible work ethic. When I went outside to shovel, Daniel was out there without a coat, begging me to let him help. Once he had his coat and boots on, he helped pour salt out of a bag roughly a quarter his size, even though we had all the salt we needed already. Ian also did some makeshift mopping. Madeleine was everywhere we went. When I vacuumed the stairs, young Daniel climbed me, and then took over the job until finally getting distracted (at which point I jumped on the opportunity to finish the last few stairs). No matter where I went, there were two or three children, more or less all the time.

And finally, unlike the truly laborious next generation on the project, I embraced the actual Soviet work ethic. One old Soviet saying was: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." I quickly figured out that we weren't leaving the house today - we couldn't possibly get the house clean in time to do anything fun, especially with the entourage in tow, but that still there were a million and one opportunities to play. The children are easily distracted, so they ended up doing lots of fun things, and I joined them. Plus, because they talked all day, as usual they sent me running off to my laptop at regular intervals to blog out thoughts, statements, images that I never could have made up on my own.

The house still isn't really clean, but we managed to have a nice day. I learned this past week, which was February vacation for Ian and Daniel, that they truly prefer to stay home anyway, and actually beam with enthusiasm when they talk about staying home all day and reading stories and the like. I feel ethically obliged to make at least some effort to take them somewhere, but apparently they'd really prefer to stay home. It reminds me of their cousins, who lived in New Jersey and spent part of every summer on Martha's Vineyard; when the parents actually asked them where they'd rather be, it turned out that New Jersey was the staycation "destination" of choice. Going out often means mass consumption of corporate pre-packaged "experiences," usually alongside very conscious consumer-types, often in crowds and at the end of long lines. It seems that home really is "home sweet home." I feel that way especially since I live in a cubicle five days a week: home is almost an adventure, and really a very nice place to be. But the fact is, wherever the family is, the fun is. The children apparently felt that way about me while I was mopping. I feel that way about my family, pretty-much no matter what we're doing. The adventure is wherever we happen to be.

The only complication of the Soviet overlay was that we had something to do - clean the house - that made it difficult to justify going out. But it's February in New England. So we pretended to work a bit, but as usual, we had fun. And for the children, even the work was fun. The actual, historical Soviet experiment might have gone so much better, if it weren't for Marx's brutal power paradigm, and if people didn't have to pretend to take the whole thing so seriously.

(February 26, 2011)