Exactly one hundred years ago today the USSR adopted an experimental calendar with five-day “weeks,” according to On This Day, While more reliable sources show that this calendar wasn’t implemented until 1929, it is nonetheless true that shortly after taking power in Russia a serious attempt was made by the Soviet government to overhaul the original structure of the seven-day week, eliminating any sense of Saturday, Sunday, or simply “the weekend.” Due to ongoing issues, the experimental calendar devolved into many different versions, but it was ultimately dropped for a return to the seven-day week in 1940. Why? In brief, the experiment was a crippling failure.
Called the nepreryvka, or “continuous working week,” this five-day week was solely composed of workdays in which days of rest were staggered among the workforce. Additionally, each of the five days was marked by a politically appropriate symbol: a wheatsheaf, a red star, a hammer and sickle, a book, and, finally, budenovka, or a woolen military cap. Each day, eighty percent of the workforce were told to go to work and twenty percent to stay home, meaning that each worker had one day of rest per Soviet-style week. By design, this policy did not account for family and community structures; the father of a household might rest on the first day while the mother rested the second day, the eldest child the third, and so on. People were given rest, yet they were to rest alone. There would be no common rest among the organic familial unit, nor even a common rest among the society. To the Soviet, rest was a necessary evil.
What had been the purpose of this experiment? For one, totalitarian states such as Soviet regime didn’t simply destroy the Ancien Régime and expect the rest of their scheme to fall in place by some inevitable chain of events. They had to enforce the conditions in which the proletariat could fulfil his essence, or more aptly his destiny, as a producing animal (that is, as a producer of merely material things). For the Soviet, the claim that man was made in the image of God, let alone a rational creature, was preposterous. Religion after all was “opioid for the masses.”1 Therefore, since man was ultimately a material-producing animal, labor was the means of salvation, the means of production the new sacraments, and material production the consummation of man’s final happiness.
If the Communist ideal was to be attained, the Soviets needed to implement a new paradigm not only in the realm of place but within the realm of time itself, breaking men’s antiquated ways. They needed not only to control men’s actions but also their thinking. Even the concept of time was to be ordered towards material production. To them, a day without work was wasted. Sundays thus became intolerable in this new world order, and so too faith and family. All vestiges of the old man could be cast aside for the gods of labor. In the end, however, it seems the gods of labor failed them.
What we see today, then, as we saw with Soviet Russia in the last century, is the misunderstanding of man’s nature and end, and therefore the disintegration of all else. While the gods of labor and material production ruled the stage in 20th century Russia, the gods of self, pleasure, and consumption (and even still material production) rule our lives today. What is common both then and now is the malaise of material reductionism, wrought by in large part by aggressive leaps and bounds in technology, in our lives. The spirit is weak, and the flesh is willing.
Whatever the Soviet’s claim, he fundamentally misunderstood man’s nature; for while men find fulfillment in good and honest work (a necessary part of the human condition) and while technological advancement brings much good (while also bringing uncharted dangers), we are not at root simply producing and consuming animals but are instead creatures of worship, whether religious or secular—we may worship the God of Abraham and Isaac, we may worship false concepts of this same God, we may worship pagan deities, or we may worship the false idols or labor, science, pleasure, or power, but we all worship something, and in the end it orders, or disorders, everything else that we do. The question then becomes, what, or who, are we to worship?
The Christian might keep holy the Sabbath in some tacit way, but it is more often the case that he also burns incense to the gods of popular culture, giving most of his Sunday to streaming sports, social media, or other technological distractions. I by no means acquit myself of this charge, and God forbid that it be immoral that we watch a football game on the Lord’s Day or check social media, but how often do we truly find rest in our lives from the constant buzz of this digital age?
Our response to this pervasive tidal wave of technology should hardly be reactionary, but it should be measured and intentional as we make efforts to clear ever-growing material and technological distractions from our Sundays, our minds, and our souls. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” as the poet William Butler Yeats writes, if man’s final end is not the principle by which men order their lives, and ultimately their time.2 What we do on Sundays is telling of our telos. Big Brother may have been temporarily exiled, but he’s come dressed in a new suit, bringing back with him the “continuous week” through a legion of technology. He doesn’t need to drag you out of your home to the factory because he’s now living in your home, in your pocket, and in your bedroom.
“Yes, they tell me that there are men
Who work well and who sleep poorly.
Who don’t sleep. What a lack of confidence in me.
It’s almost worse than if they worked poorly but slept well…
I’m talking about those who…don’t have the courage, don’t have the
confidence, don’t sleep.”
~ Charles Peguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope
Paraphrase of Karl Marx’s well-known view of traditional religion
“The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats