Though only ten
years have passed, some will recall already with nostalgia the iconic poster
for Occupy Wall Street depicting a poised dancer, a leg raised in an arabesque
atop Arturo Di Modica’s charging bull in bronze representing the fierce
voracity of the capitalist class. [1] The charm of the image arose from its play
with structural oppositions: female/male, beauty/power, aesthetic/mercenary, in
form sinuous/blocky, in attitude poised and elegant/aggressive and angry. Such a dramatic contrast between art and
money finds acceptance both among philistines to whom only wealth-seeking is a
worthy activity and intellectuals and artists uninterested, even scornful, of
economic activity. For the former the
arts at best are an optional taste and for the latter business could occupy
only mediocre minds. Friction between
these attitudes periodically emerges, for instance, in the twentieth-century
tensions between the Surrealists and the Communists in Europe or the Yippies and,
say, Progressive Labor activists in the U. S.
One could
scarcely imagine a more passionate advocate for the aesthetic than Oscar
Wilde. His flaunted hedonism and
transgressive wit as well as his own class background and his place in society might
suggest that he would be likely to be a defender of aristocratic privilege, but
Wilde manages to turn this expectation, like so many others, on its head. His “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” [2] succeeds
as a novel and effective polemic for economic revolution without abandoning the
characteristic epigrams and ironies familiar from his plays. Moreover, he was able to construct a coherent
argument for socialism while maintaining his provocative aestheticism. [3] In a quite Wildean inversion, in his most
important points he is on the mark when out of his field in politics, while his
notions about art which he had made central to his value system, are neither
reliable nor consistent.
He makes
the essential point with appropriate broadness.
As capitalism is the source of poverty and other social ills, it must be
overturned to make a real change. Wilde aims to “reconstruct society on such a
basis that poverty will be impossible.” The first principle of the new society
must be socialized ownership of the means of production. “Socialism, Communism, or whatever one
chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and
substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper
condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being
of each member of the community.” This
alone is crucial; all else may be settled by democratic means.
His motive is to
beautify his country, but this requires an alteration in the economic system. The state of the urban slums in Wilde’s time
was horrific. Reader of not only Marx
but also Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell will know the desperate straits in which many
ordinary people found themselves. Even
for those with employment, workers are “compelled to do the work of beasts of
burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are
forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want.” The result of these savage conditions is a
poverty-stricken class possessing “no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or
civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life.” One can not avoid seeing such wretches, “tramping
about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their
neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try
and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging.” To him it is nearly incredible that “a man
whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in
their continuance.” If they do, it is
surely because “misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise
such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really
conscious of its own suffering.”
The affluent, on
the other hand, due to their leisure, are “the real men, the men who have
realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.” Yet at the same time, the system is profoundly
unsatisfying even to the ruling class. “The
possession of private property is very often extremely demoralizing.” Among its deleterious effects is to make the
rich man tiresome. “Property not merely
has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a
bore.” For Wilde’s posing persona,
nothing could be worse. Yet, like most
of the essay, it is not in the end a joke, for who could really be interested
in enriching the boss, or in the financial concerns of another at all? Display of wealth or designs on wealth are
virtually always in poor taste. Apart
from requiring the exploitation of others the pursuit of money is ultimately
disappointing even when successful, as it is based on a fundamental error. “It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing
was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.”
Though quite
willing to sound like a genteel snob, Wilde’s motive is in fact that of all
reformers whether they consider themselves aesthetes or not, a distaste for the
sheer ugliness of capitalism which is, after all, centered in a repellant
selfishness. Yet at the same time he
realizes that the game is in earnest and recognizes that such progress as the
end of feudalism has come only through armed struggle, going so far as to say in
his consistently aesthetic rhetoric, that “The very violence of a revolution
may make the public grand and splendid for a moment.” All force is not equivalent: “To the thinker,
the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie
Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the
Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.” Apart from the suggestion that revolution is
likely to arrive only through armed struggle (in contrast the programmatically
gradualist Fabians [4]), though, Wilde says nothing about how the change in
economic system is to arrive.
He quite properly
attacks even the most well-meaning charity for prolonging rather than ending the
system that produced the suffering the philanthropist seeks to ameliorate. To him such efforts are “ridiculously
inadequate” if not “impertinent.” Reformers
who call for anything less than social ownership of the means of production are
displaying self-righteous vanity. “It is
immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that
result from the institution of private property.” In the ringing tones of the soapbox, Wilde
asks, “Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s
table? They should be seated at the
board, and are beginning to know it.” For
Wilde what is ugly is therefore “immoral” and the Victorian slums offered
plenty of nastiness, both aesthetic and ethical.
If Wilde’s
militance is explicit, so is his libertarianism. He states categorically that “No
Authoritarian Socialism will do.” He
adds “Authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man
is fine.” (The reader notices the
similarity of the use here of “fine,” with the earlier cited “grand and
splendid.”) Any authoritarian system
would result, he says, in “Industrial Tyranny” as oppressive as that of the
robber barons. The twenty-first century
readers may consider Wilde’s warnings well-considered, having witnessed
Leninist “democratic centralism,” Stalinist and Maoist cults of personality,
and even more extreme “ultra-left” manifestations such as the Khmer Rouge or
the Sendero Luminoso.
He aligned himself with Kropotkin’s
anarchism, calling the Russian "a man with a soul of that beautiful white
Christ which seems coming out of Russia.” [5]
The keynote of the essay, the identification of individualism with
socialism, while yielding insight with its provocative novelty generates
weaknesses as well. Some might worry
that there is a contradiction in his definition: “The State is to be a
voluntary association that will organise labour.” This goal, so casually tossed off, ignores
the tension (at best) between centralized planning and personal liberty. Yet the reader does not notice in Wilde’s
succeeding phrases, so balanced as to seem inevitable. “The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.”
In general Wilde
is little concerned with either the mechanisms that might bring a socialist
revolution or the governing principles he would find ideal thereafter. Much of his dreamier utopian rhetoric arises
from his newfound anarchist loyalties.
It is all very well to say “Nothing should be able to rob a man at all”
or “all authority is quite degrading,” but such absoluteness is elusive in
practice. It may be that best government
for artists is none at all when it comes to encouragement of propaganda and
discouragement of criticism, but many might find it a different matter if the
issue were regulation of copyright and even outright social support of the arts
as for other industries. Wilde is surely
willfully ignoring his own knowledge of human nature when he declares with
confidence, “When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants,
and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any
interest to him to interfere with anyone else.”
Perhaps having recently read Engels on The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State, he tells us that “in communistic
tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.”
Not just jealousy, it seems, will die out under socialism, but with it
all forms of authority and of punishment.
As a part of ending coercion, “marriage in its present form must
disappear” when women cease to be a commodity.
Wilde sounds
something like an anarcho-syndicalist; he would have been sympathetic to the
program of the I.W.W. which likewise envisioned a sort of voluntary
organization of labor. Considering the sensational
success of his lecture to the miners in Leadville, Colorado [5], he might in
fact have found a comrade in Big Bill Haywood. Wilde’s program, however, unlike the
Wobblies’, can only be workable with the assumption that unpleasant tasks can
be all but eliminated by automation, a circumstance that would certainly be
liberating were it possible. Wilde
claims that all “pleasureless activities” are “mentally and morally injurious
to man.” “Man,” he argues, “is made for
something better than disturbing dirt.
All work of that kind should be done by a machine.”
Wilde maintains
that the condition of the workers in the industrial age is paradoxically even
worse than in times of less technology. “As soon as man had invented a machine to do
his work he began to starve.” The root
of the problem is capitalism. “The one
man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times
as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a
great deal more than he really wants.”
This analysis is quite accurate; the flaw is in the expectation that
automation can render labor entirely optional and allow every individual to do
as he or she pleases.
Fanciful as it
sounds, this presumption is not peculiar to Wilde. William Morris’s News from Nowhere,
which had appeared the year before Wilde’s essay, likewise envisioned an end to
marriage, schools, and coercion. He,
too, thought the magic of technology could undo the condemnation to labor laid
upon Adam in the third book of Genesis, and his imagined future, as beautiful
as Wilde’s, exhibits a similar dubious optimism.
While it may be
true that modern people in developed countries spend more hours in work than
hunter-gatherers, these utopian hopes are not wholly unfounded. The mere fact that at the time of the
Revolution over 90% of Americans were farmers whereas today the figure is only
1.3% indicates that our basic needs are today being met by the labor of a very
few. In the present inefficient system,
another 12% are industrial workers. Many
of the rest are producing nothing but rather simply manipulating symbols on
computer screens.
Prominent
economists during the twentieth century shared portions of this happy vision of
the of work’s coming obsolescence. John
Maynard Keynes in the ‘thirties predicted a fifteen-hour work week [6] and in
the ‘fifties John Kenneth Galbraith said that automation was likely to “eliminate
toil as a required economic institution.” [7]
During the ‘sixties, no shortage of prophets proclaimed the end of work,
and, in more recent years, concepts such as the guaranteed annual income
suggest that it is no longer necessary for everyone to have a job at all. [8] Still, even a sympathetic reader must be
troubled by Wilde’s easy progress from acknowledging that “civilisation
requires slaves” to the prediction, vague and grand, that “there will be great
storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this
force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs.”
If Wilde may be
faulted for a failure to explain either how socialism might come to Britain or
how production would then be organized, he must as well be credited with the
novel insight fundamental to his essay: that socialism offers freedom and
individualism in contrast to the slavish conformity required by capitalism. Though Wilde will at times toss off whimsical
throw-away paradoxes that bear little scrutiny, the equation of socialism and
individualism is at once the most striking witty inversion of the essay and the
heart of Wilde’s argument, the notion on which the practical value of Wilde’s
ideas must stand or fall.
This theme,
announced with a bang in the first sentence which labels “living for others” as
“sordid,” is repeated throughout.
“Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to
Individualism.” Under capitalism the
individual has “absolutely of no importance.”
The promise offered by change is as clear as the current defect: “With
the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy
Individualism.” “Individualism, then, is
what through Socialism we are to attain to.”
This individualism will have nothing in common with exploitation;
rather, it seems to Wilde to be altogether benevolent, allowing one to “freely
develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him,” and thus to
experience the true pleasure and joy of living.”
Wilde’s paean to
evolutionary individualism, though using the new and “scientific” language of
evolution, in fact betrays his enthusiasm more than it provides evidence.
“It is to be noted also that
Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which
merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous
cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage
mutilation. In fact, it does not come to
man with any claims upon him at all. It
comes naturally and inevitably out of man.
It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all
organisms grow. It is the perfection
that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life
quickens. And so Individualism exercises
no compulsion over man. On the contrary,
it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over
him. It does not try to force people to
be good. It knows that people are good
when they are let alone. Man will
develop Individualism out of himself.
Man is now so developing Individualism.
To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether
Evolution is practical. Evolution is the
law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a
case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.”
Wilde’s strongest confirmation of this
marvelous individualism is to cite artists as individualists who “have been
able to realise their personality more or less completely.” Absurdly claiming that “not one of these men
ever did a single day’s work for hire,” he imagines that freedom from wage
slavery will similarly illuminate the life of everyman, unleashing “the great
actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally.” The process is self-enforcing, since becoming
oneself will also give a person pleasure.
“It is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop
itself.” This will entail as well a
flowering of loving actions since “when man has realised Individualism, he will
also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.”
The reader may relish the wit of
formulations like those in this passage.
A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes
to dress. But in doing that he is acting
in a perfectly natural manner.
Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the
views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority,
will probably be extremely stupid.
Wilde claims that under this new order everyone will realize
the greatest and most natural potential possible. Consumerism will come to an end since “Nobody
will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the
world.” One can hardly avoid concurring
with Wilde’s regret “that society should be constructed on such a basis that
man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is
wonderful, and fascinating and delightful in him. —in which, in fact, he
misses”
Wilde’s
concluding line hints in a way at his willful impracticality. “The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.” He may have in mind such lines as these from
the well-known speech of Pericles during the Peloponnesian War.
The freedom which we enjoy in our
government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a
jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry
with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those
injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no
positive penalty. [9]
Wilde is well
aware that he is propounding unlikely claims.
To his sensibility that fact simply provides evidence of his imagination. Utopianism, far from useless fantasy, is the
motive for every step forward. “A map of
the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it
leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out,
and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
A further defect
of Wilde’s essay deforms its structure without affecting his central
points. Much of the latter half of “The
Soul of Man Under Socialism” is devoted to a lengthy and polemical treatment of
art with little relevance the socioeconomic topic under discussion. In addition Wilde’s primary contention here,
which he goes out of his way to demonstrate, is simply wrong. Wilde characterizes art as the idiosyncratic
product of a wholly individual vision, “the unique result of a unique
temperament. Its beauty comes from the
fact that the author is what he is. It
has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.” Wilde is quite emphatic on this point: “if he
does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.” [10] In his view readers and viewers must become
more like writers and painters. They
need only be receptive. “Now Art should
never try to be popular. The public
should try to make itself artistic.” To him
popular taste is regularly lack of taste.
His assumptions
ignore the fact that art always confirms as well as criticizes presuppositions;
it abides by some conventions while twisting or ignoring others. All art is at once derivative and innovative,
just as every verbal expression is based on what the speaker has heard before
while not exactly reproducing the earlier utterance, even if the words are
unchanged. Yet works and genres of art
vary tremendously in their place on the continuum that stretches from
predictability to novelty. Oral
literature and folk materials in earlier times and works produced as
commodities for a mass audience will tend toward the familiar side of the
spectrum, while works of “high art,” produced for a sophisticated elite, are
more likely to be transgressive in both form and content. Wilde ignores the very real function of art
to confirm and reinforce social norms, insisting that every individual vision
is inherently beautiful and worthy and novel as well. He goes further yet, finding the artist’s
individualism a summum bonum, and yet condemning as “egotism” any
criticism from a member of the public with little regard for the individuality
of the consumer of art. By insisting on
making novelty and self-expression the criteria for excellence, he ignores the
value of a good deal of human artworks and a portion of the rest.
He is motivated in
part by the appealingly decadent reputation of art for art’s sake, but also by
his counter-culture instincts. He liked
to épater la bourgeoisie when that very idea was more or less fresh [11]
and gamely tossed back the suggestions that some works (such as his own) were
“immoral,” “morbid,” and “unhealthy.”
The essay was published five days after he was imprisoned. Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty” notes that the
“roar” of the masses, even their “reigns of Terror” and “great Anarchies”
“mirror my wildest passions like the sea.”
For Wilde there can be little doubt that the personal was indeed
unavoidably political.
The contribution
of Wilde’s essay is twofold: by a sort of rhetorical jiu-jitsu he reverses the
widespread misconception that collectivism restricts freedom and he ties the
pursuit of socialism which some may question to the pursuit of pleasure from
which dissent is less likely. And he is
quite right. The effete writer agrees
with the Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that socialism
offers liberation not only from want but from alienation as well. If liberty means anything, it requires an end
to exploitation. One cannot be happy
while another is constantly picking his pocket.
Even if labor fell short of being the fulfilling joy that Wilde thinks
possible, it would at least no longer be wage slavery.
The essay has lasting
value for both philosophy and politics as well as for literature. The fact that it is most wise when speaking
of politics and most mistaken when treating art is a contradiction Wilde
himself might have relished. “The Soul
of Man Under Socialism” sketches out how art and the individual could be the
ally of ethics and the masses. In the
‘sixties I liked to say that I was not agitating for the benefit of Blacks or
the poor, but for my own. I like to
imagine Wilde, in all his lace and velvet, demonstrating for Black Lives
Matter. He surely would have found our
recent president unspeakably vulgar. His
élan
is enough to excuse his rosy hopes. If
some epigrams fall with a bit of a thud, others generate new knowledge. Here, in particular, Wilde’s clear-sighted
recognition that social ownership if the means of production is a precondition
for individual liberty emerges from his inversions of his readers’
expectations.
Wilde is an entertainer. His writing is animated with charm and wit, ornamented
with figures of speech, and gilded by a gleaming utopianism. Let there be many socialisms, and among them
the great-hearted self-interest advocated by Wilde.
1. Further tropes
include a number of satiric variations of the original Adbusters image: one
replaced the poster’s advice “bring tents” with “bring deodorant,” while others
substituted different figures for the dancer: Bernie Sanders, an executive with
an attaché case. The trope that
attracted the most attention was Kristen Visbal’s 2017 Fearless Girl bronze
facing the bull, which, though it had been produced as part of an advertising
campaign for an investment management firm, was considered feminist and
progressive by many.
2. The essay was
published first in the Fortnightly Review for February of 1891 as “The
Soul of Man Under Socialism.” When it
was issued as a book in 1895 the title was simply The Soul of Man, but
the longer version has been preferred in most reprintings since.
3. Aesthetic and
political concerns were combined by other Victorians. Among the first to come to mind are John
Ruskin and Bernard Shaw. Perhaps apart
from Wilde the best example is William Morris.
4. Wilde wrote this
piece shortly after hearing Shaw lecture.
Shaw reportedly reacted, commenting “it was very witty and entertaining,
but had nothing whatever to do with socialism.”
5. In De profundis. Kropotkin expressed in return a sympathetic
interest in Wilde’s work.
6. Leadville was a
boom town at the time, full of bars, brothels, and firearms. Wilde provides an entertaining account in Impressions
of America which includes the supposed barroom sign “Please do not shoot
the pianist. He is doing his best.” As a gag about America, this line had already
been circulating in Britain at least since 1879, first described as posted by a
church organist in Arkansas, but then relocated west to California but still in
a church in another English paper, and in 1882 in the Washington Post it
is placed in a Leadville church. Wilde simply
adaptedz the proven joke to his uses.
7. Keynes, ”Economic
Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930) and Galbraith, The Affluent
Society (1958).
8. Among many more recent
works exploring the idea are Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work: The Decline of
the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (1995) and Inventing
the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015) by Nick Srnicek
and Alex Williams.
9. This is Richard
Crawley’s translation.
10. The passage is really
quite harsh. “They are continually
asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their
absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what
they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after
eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their
own stupidity.”
11. The phrase has
been used by a number of authors including Dumas père (in Le père la ruine). The earliest usage seems to be in Alexandre
Privat d'Anglemont’ Paris Anecdote (1855), p. 85. In 1854 the phrase “il faut épater le
public" appeared in Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny’s Nouveau
Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique.
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