Zizek: I think that we should return to good old Oscar Wilde.
You may have heard of novels like The Picture of Dorian Gray or plays like The Importance
of Being Earnest – of Oscar Wilde, the great satirist – the comedian – the literary
genius.
You may know him as a political icon for LGBTQ+ liberation.
But did you know that Peter Kropotkin, one of the most prominent theorists of anarchist
communism, wrote that Oscar Wilde’s political writing was “worth being engraved”?
It’s one of popular literary history’s best-kept secrets that Oscar Wilde was openly
a socialist.
And he wasn’t just calling for free healthcare or an increase of the minimum wage.
In fact, Oscar Wilde wrote uncompromisingly of his radical desire for the complete and
total abolition of all private property – a precondition, he believed, for the emancipation
of all of humanity.
But how did Oscar Wilde arrive at such a radical socialist position?
Let’s dial it back and look at his background to give some context to his politics.
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and raised in the affluent Merrion Square area.
His family were part of the Anglo-Irish intellectual tradition - his father, “Sir William Wilde”,
being an influential surgeon, and his mother, “Lady Jane Wilde” being a well-known poet.
It might seem strange that someone born into such a privileged context would come to embrace
far-left politics.
But, in fact, his mother, Jane Wilde, was a radical poet, writing under the pen name
of “Speranza”.
She was a traitor to the British empire, the colonial Unionist tradition, and to the ruling
class more broadly.
Against the backdrop of the famine in 1848, Jane Wilde, writing in The Nation, explicitly
called for revolutionary armed struggle to liberate Ireland from the yoke of British
imperialism: “Now is the moment to strike, and by striking save, and the day after the
victory it will be time enough to count our dead”.
In published writings, she ardently defended the Fenians, observers to the First International,
whose 1867 Proclamation called for international solidarity with the Irish people’s revolutionary
struggle to achieve national liberation, and the liberation of the working class.
Jane Wilde was committed to the emancipation of Ireland, the emancipation of labour, and
the emancipation of women.
It should come as no surprise then that the Marxist revolutionary republican, James Connolly,
would go on to quote Jane Wilde’s writing in his landmark text, Labour in Irish History
(chapter 14), when tracing the socialist tradition of Ireland throughout the ages.
Against this backdrop, the context for Jane’s son, Oscar’s, radical politics suddenly
becomes a lot clearer.
Now let’s fast forward to 1891 to take a look at what Oscar Wilde’s radical politics
entailed, as described in the one and only explicitly political essay he wrote, titled
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism”.
Here, Wilde outlines his political vision for a perfect society, explicitly using the
term “Communism”: “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.
It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment.”
He was hugely insistent on abolishing private property and converting it to public wealth.
But the way he frames this may come as a bit of a surprise.
He advocates socialism and the abolition of private property for the purpose of supporting
Individualism, rather than collectivism.
Wilde claims that “Private property has crushed true Individualism” … “With
the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.
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.
Most people exist, that is all.”
A far cry from the collectivist motivations for socialism and communism that we usually
hear.
However, it should be clarified that the Individualism that Wilde promotes seems to centre primarily
on the production of art.
“Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.
I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.”
(Wilde) So, it’s perhaps not the greedy, self-centred
egotism that one might immediately think of when they hear the word Individualism.
In fact, Wilde argues that the popular conception of Individualism has been completely distorted
by private property: “The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism,
and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.
It has led Individualism entirely astray.
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.
The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.”
Wilde conceptualises socialism as a system that allows artists to flourish most completely.
No longer would they be burdened with the shackles of capitalism, limited to producing
the kind of art that sells, or helps to sell products – artists would finally be able
to self-actualise and produce the kind of works that they wanted.
However, Wilde didn’t believe capitalists should be substituted by governments that
would commission artists to produce their works.
In fact, Wilde believes that “All modes of government are failures”.
That being said, he also appears to be okay with a limited form of some kind of “State”;
“[But] as the State is not to govern,” [Wilde writes] “it may be asked what the
State is to do.
The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer
and distributor of necessary commodities.
The State is to make what is useful.
The individual is to make what is beautiful.”
Now, Wilde believed that such a society could be maintained by the employment of machinery
to do all work that humans wouldn’t want to.
And, further, he knew that automation and technological development under capitalism
wouldn’t be enough.
He understood that where there is private ownership of the means of production, such
technological development would only benefit the capitalists to the detriment of the workers.
But “Were that machine[ry] the property of all, everyone would benefit by it.”
So rather than spending all our time labouring, “Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying
cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful
things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and
delight, [while] machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.”
Now, you may be thinking, “Doesn’t a lot of this sound a bit, well, utopian?”
Wilde addresses this very point in the essay; “Is this Utopian?
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.”
So, yes – Wilde’s vision of socialism absolutely is utopian, and unabashedly so!
His thinking follows the tradition of utopian socialists like Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert
Owen, rather than the tradition of Marxist scientific socialism.
We see this in how Wilde appears to start at an end point, basically unconcerned with
strategies for how we’ll get there.
He dedicates his time to conjuring up his vision of a perfect socialist society which
should then be imposed upon reality, rather than deriving his analysis from reality (by
studying the class contradictions which are present, and what the resolution of these
contradictions would entail).
This follows the bourgeois notion that great men construct society according to their grand
visions, rather than class struggle being the driving force of history.
Nowhere is this misconception demonstrated more clearly than when Wilde discusses the
abolition of slavery in the United States.
He claims that “Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action
on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free.
It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston
and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to
do with the question really.”, which is factually incorrect.
Slave revolts like the 1739 Stono Rebellion, the 1811 German Coast Uprising, Nat Turner’s
Slave Rebellion of 1831 and more demonstrate this as objectively false.
It's a symptom of Wilde’s utopian idealism where he assumes that agitators from the privileged
classes come down from on high to advance social-historical progress.
He believes this to be the only way to realise progress because, according to Wilde, “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.
They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.
What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true.
Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented
class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them.
That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.
Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.”
As with some other utopian socialist thinkers, to Wilde, the oppressed class is incapable
of liberating itself from its oppressor, or even recognising its oppression, and requires
external agitators – a position which stands in stark contrast with the materialist conception
of history, as outlined by Marx and Engels.
The basis for socialism, for Wilde, is not to be found within the internal contradiction
of capitalism – the antagonism between its social character of production and its private
form of appropriation, manifested in the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie
– rather, the basis for socialism, for Wilde, is to be found externally, in the minds of
great intellectuals and agitators, who would then impose their grand utopian visions upon
the world.
Oscar Wilde died young at just 46 years of age in the year 1900.
In many ways, his thought was decades ahead of his time – likely appearing “too extreme”
for many of today’s supposed radicals who are more interested in simply making capitalism
friendlier with milquetoast social-democratic reforms than abolishing it completely and
putting a socialist system in its place.
But the task before us today, over a century later, is not to spend our time dreaming of
a perfect utopian society.
There’s no time left to dream.
With impending climate catastrophe on our doorstep, we’re facing down the cruel reality
that the only options before us are socialism or extinction.
The task now is to get organised and fight for a socialist future, resolving the contradiction
between the labouring masses of the world and the capitalist ruling class once and for
all.
A position which, were they alive today, there can be no doubt that both Jane and Oscar Wilde
would agree with.
Thank you for watching this video.
Hopefully you’ve found it useful in one way or another.
If you’d like to learn more about the differences between Utopian Socialism and Marxist Scientific
Socialism, check out the recent Socialism 101 video on this topic, which you’ll find
linked in the description box below.
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