THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

The Soul of Man under Socialism

Alywn Edgar

[Two articles on The Soul of Man under Socialism by Alwyn Edgar appeared in the Socialist Standard, the monthly journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The first, edited by Nigel Green, appeared in 1993, was the other in 2000. We felt these deserved a wider audience, and republished them in December 2002 by kind permission of Alwyn Edgar, of Nigel Green, and of Adam Buick and the Editorial Committee of the Socialist Standard.]

Alwyn Edgar told us 'I embarked on this subject because I am writing a mammoth History of the Highland Clearances. Lord Ronald Gower, brother of the third Duke of Sutherland (and of three duchesses), and grandson of the clearing Countess of Sutherland, wrote defending the Sutherland clearances. Yet he was, I read, a friend and associate of Oscar Wilde. I thought that Wilde could not have shared those particular views, so I tried to find what Wilde did think.'

I. Wilde: The Soul of Man of Socialism

Oscar Wilde was a well known critic of many aspects of the nineteenth century Britain in which he lived. Especially interesting from a WSM point of view are the views that he expressed in his essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Wilde's description of socialism was as a world without private property. He clearly favoured this kind of society, commenting that

‘It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institutions of private property’.

He does not state that socialism is a world without money. His criticism of charity, however, does imply that the capitalist system should not be reformed but abolished:

‘Their remedies do not cure the disease; they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease’.

Although written just over one hundred years ago it is remarkably apt for the contemporary world. Wilde continues:

‘For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime’.

The structure of De Profundis, as Gagnier has demonstrated, alternates between the meticulous reconstruction of episodes from Wilde’s shared past with Douglas and the attempt to create a philosophy which gives meaning to his current situation, since, as Wilde says, ‘I could not bear [my sufferings] to be without meaning’ (Selected Letters, 195). Now for Wilde:

This is far removed from the traditional values in nineteenth century Britain which we still hear about, as is his condemnation of contemporary attitudes to the poor. He comments:

‘sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less’.

Anticipating criticism of this view, he argues that ‘no Authoritarian Socialism will do’, meaning socialism cannot be forced on people and can only be achieved when the majority want it:

‘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 ensure the material well-being of each member of the community.

This is as good a definition of socialism as we will find. As well as material well-being, socialism will, for Wilde, also help to bring about a positive brand of 'individualism' in which every people can fulfill their individual potential:

‘One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.’

This personality or ‘spirit,’ is what Wilde means by the 'Soul of Man.' With the end of war, hunger and poverty, people will take for granted the material things of this world and concentrate on ‘not in what man has but in what man is.’

Wilde sees machinery as vitally important for this type of society, since it can do most, if not all, of the work:

‘At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.’

Wilde predicts that this will leave man to enjoy:

‘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.’

Whilst a socialist world may still require plenty of useful work to be done, it is true that technology can help humanity. Instead of studying new ways for us to kill each other, scientists can concentrate on developing things which would improve the quality of life for everyone. As Wilde puts it:

The state is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful’.

Wilde defines the state as

‘an association that will organize labour and be the voluntary manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities’.

To use the word state was a mistake as he did not mean a government and argued that ‘the state is not to govern’. For Wilde, the ‘state’ simply meant the co-operation of humans to provide what we need.

The Soul of Man serves as a good introduction to socialism, and is clearly still relevant today:

‘They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not the solution; it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.’

II. Oscar Wilde and Socialism

Oscar Wilde died a hundred years ago this month, in exile in Paris. This will be the occasion for a lot of talk about his achievements and accomplishments but we doubt that much will be said about the fact that he once wrote a socialist pamphlet. So this is a good time to take another look at Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism, which was first published in February 1890.

Without necessarily agreeing with every last word in the essay, we would accept that much of it is as true and as relevant today as it was 110 years ago. (Don't worry about Wilde's use of the word ‘soul’-he clearly means ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’, and obviously wrote ‘soul’ because, as a virtuoso literary craftsman, he savoured the euphony of the word with ‘Socialism’.) To start with, he realized that socialism and communism mean the same thing:

‘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 ensure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment . . . Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society.’

So-called ‘human nature’ is no bar to this society. The idea of an unchanging ‘human nature’ is repudiated: ‘The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.’

Wilde condemns the demented rush after money that capitalism demands of all its subjects. In capitalist society, ‘man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property’. No one is free from this basic imperative. ‘There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor’. Furthermore, ‘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’.

The rich salve their consciences by disgorging at rare intervals a minute fraction of their loot. But charity, however well-meaning, is no answer:

‘Their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system from being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good . . . It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.’

State capitalism, particularly when imposed by an authoritarian state, which many people confused then and confuse now with socialism, was no answer:

‘Of course authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine . . . If the Socialism is authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.’

Government itself will disappear in socialism: ‘The State must give up all idea of government . . . All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised’.

Wilde saw that there would have to be a revolutionary change in the economic basis of society, and that this would have inevitable repercussions in the way people behaved:

‘When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist ... Though a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear . . . Crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness.’

Who will do the dirty work? Machinery will do it, said Wilde. (And, of course, machinery is enormously more developed now than it was in Wilde's day to do all the jobs which people do not wish to do manually.) ‘All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery’. This will release each individual to help the community in his or her own way by doing service or producing things which will satisfy each person's need to be active, to contribute and to help. Wilde summed it up: ‘The community by means of organization of machinery will supply the useful things, and . . . the beautiful things will be made by the individual’.

Thus Wilde was able to demolish the myth that socialism and individualism are in some way opposed, in some way different. In fact, only socialism can provide the basis for individualism, only socialism can allow individualism (for all, not merely for a fortunate few) to flourish:

‘Private property has crushed true individualism, and set up an individualism that is false . . . 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.’

If these ideas had been accepted and acted on at the time, what an enormous amount of human misery would have been avoided.

© Alwyn Edgar 1993, 2000

The Soul of Man (the 'under Socialism' was dropped from the title with Wilde's approval) is available at

http://tanaya.net/Books/slman10/

and

http://www.classicbookshelf.com/library/readingroom/?code=60&book=the+soul+of+man

and

http://sailor.gutenberg.org/etext97/slman10.txt

Recent editions include one edited by Isobel Murray (with an introduction), Oxford University Press 1999 Oxford World’s Classics (re-issue of the 1990 Oxford edition); the Wordsworth Classics edition De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and other Writings [The Decay of Lying, the Critic as Artist, The Soul of Man under Socialism], also 1999; the Penguin Classics edition, edited by Linda Dowling (1999); and the Journeyman Press edition published in London in 1988.

Translations known to us include L'Ame de l’homme, translated into French with an introduction by François Weisman (Paris: Moraïma 1995); the French version by Isabelle Drouin published by Éditions Avatar in Paris in 1990; there are Italian versions by L. Cafagna, published in Milan in 1989 and J. Guerrasio, Rome 1979. The German version by Gustav Landauer & Hedwig Lachmann (first published in 1904) was reprinted by Diogenes in Zürich as late as 1982, and perhaps later?

We know of no other editions since 1945 except the one published in London in 1948 by Porcupine Press. Clearly there are many more, and perhaps readers can assist in compiling a bibliography.

'In 1901, the year when Salome was first produced in Berlin, a friend wrote to me from Russia that he had purchased in the bazaar at Nijni Novgorod copies of The Soul of Man in four different languages' -- Robert Ross: Introduction to the 1912 edition , London: Methuen p.vii.

'In his first years, Joyce associated artistic intrepidity with political self-consciousness, and he declared himself emphatically to be a ‘socialistic artist’. The character of his socialism was never made clear; he mentions Wilde and Lassalle rather than Marx, and planned to translate Wilde's essay on the subject into Italian. He was closest to Wilde in conceiving of socialism as a means of protecting the self and enabling it to be free'. Richard Ellmann (ed.): Selected Letters of James Joyce. London: Faber & Faber 1975 p.xv.