In The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Kathi Weeks makes a compelling case for adopting a radical antiwork/postwork politics that orients itself toward “less work” rather than “better work.” The methodologies and policy positions that might fall under the banner of antiwork are diverse, but Weeks looks to the Autonomist Marxist tradition for antiwork politics’ theoretical foundation, particularly the Autonomist conception of the “refusal of work.”Footnote 1 As Weeks explains, the refusal of work does not mean a refusal to engage in productive activity. Rather, it signals a repudiation of the “work society” and the “productivist ethics” that form its ideological core: it is “a refusal of work as the necessary center of social life and means of access to the rights and claims of citizenship” and “a refusal of the ideology of work as highest calling and moral duty.”Footnote 2 As Weeks notes, adopting this position means challenging not only the work-centered capitalist society but also other Marxist traditions that problematically reproduce the productivist biases of the system they seek to supplant. Thus, her call for a widespread adoption of antiwork politics rejects not only the capitalist present but also other paths to postcapitalism. While Weeks acknowledges the potential benefits of a “better work” politics that seeks to humanize working conditions, she argues that this politics has become too easily co-opted in the twenty-first-century economy. Though the demand for “nonalienated labor” may have possessed radical oppositional force in the Fordist economy, “it loses its critical edge in the context of postmodernity’s subsumption of life into work.”Footnote 3
We need antiwork politics because the only way to radically oppose a capitalist system that equates working with living is to put work back in its place: to demystify work, reduce the time and investment we put into it, and demand a more fulfilling existence beyond its boundaries. Since the publication of Weeks’s foundational monograph over a decade ago, her argument that only antiwork politics possess the necessary critical force to dismantle late capitalism has gained significant traction. In particular, the Marxist “refusal of work” has merged with a technophilic postwork discourse centered on a new radical demand: full automation. Postwork discourse—which asserts that technological advancement will continue to render human labor obsolete—encompasses a broad span of political positions, but radical thinkers have adapted what is more often a predictive (and sometimes apocalyptic) discourse into a core political demand.Footnote 4 Postwork Marxists argue that we should not fear the unceasing march of automation but rather demand its acceleration as a path to the postcapitalist future. In Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that the radical left has for too long been dominated by a reform-minded “folk politics” that has failed to imagine large-scale societal transformation. Thus, while they acknowledge that full automation (the complete elimination of human labor through technological substitution) is not literally possible, they argue for its importance as a utopian horizon to motivate and structure anticapitalist policy in the present. Only full automation offers a future that would “liberate humanity from the drudgery of work while simultaneously producing increasing amounts of wealth.”Footnote 5 Like Weeks, Srnicek and Williams seek to combat not only capitalist work ethics but also the productivist biases of “traditional” leftist politics. “In the end,” they contend, anticapitalists must choose “between glorifying work and the working class or abolishing them both.” Because human liberation is dependent on a drastic reduction of necessary labor, the latter is “the only true postcapitalist position.”Footnote 6
If demanding full automation is the only true postcapitalist position, then Oscar Wilde was on the right side of history. In his 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde precociously embraces a version of full automation as the utopian demand that grounds his vision of the socialist future. Like his twenty-first-century counterparts, Wilde’s demand for full automation emerges from a broader philosophical antiwork position. Despite their political kinship, the connection between Wilde and contemporary radical antiwork/postwork thinkers remains underexplored. This essay seeks to elucidate this suggestive but understudied connection. My purpose is twofold. First, I believe that reading Wilde as an antiwork thinker who is critically responding to the productivist ethics of his contemporaries helps us to better understand the significance of his contributions to Victorian labor politics and, by extension, illuminates some key philosophical complexities of this politics. Connecting Wilde to a Marxist tradition associated with theoretical heavyweights like Antonio Negri may feel counterintuitive, given that Wilde’s political seriousness has been repeatedly called into question. Carolyn Lesjak has noted that in light of Wilde’s embrace of linguistic play and willful contradiction, a common impulse has been to disregard Wilde’s foray into socialist thought “as mere polemic, yet another rhetorical feint in Wilde’s repertoire of personae.”Footnote 7 Ruth Livesey has expressed a version of this position, noting that “Soul of Man” made little impact on the thriving discourse of late Victorian socialist thought and suggesting, following Josephine Guy, that the essay should be understood as “topical entertainment in response to current journalism, rather than as considered political analysis.”Footnote 8 Yet excellent work has been done to show that the essay’s unique articulation of socialism was not a momentary whim but rather an intentional product whose intellectual elements had been forged over time.Footnote 9 This essay continues the work of taking Wilde’s politics seriously, while acknowledging that to ignore the satirical playfulness and unapologetic egoism of “Soul of Man” would be to misread it. It is significant that Wilde chose the utopian form as the medium for his declaration of socialist principles. The utopian—despite accusations of tedious earnestness and authoritarian rigidness—has, since Thomas More, been a generic space in which political gravity, satirical wit, and whimsy have been promiscuously intertwined. Darko Suvin even proposed that the success of a utopian work might “be gauged by the degree of integration between its constructive-utopian and satiric aspects.”Footnote 10 The utopian thus gives Wilde license to utilize his signature satirical energies without undermining the philosophical and political commitments that shape his vision of the postcapitalist future.
My second intention in drawing this connection is strategically presentist. I believe that Wilde’s unique formulation and articulation of antiwork politics illuminate a fundamental limitation of the antiwork/postwork tradition: its failure to attend to what Marx terms “the realm of necessity” and the human labor required to sustain it. In their enthusiasm to free humanity from the burden of work, postwork visions of the future fail to successfully address how the collective labor necessary to ensure the human flourishing they promise will be organized and executed. “Soul of Man” is no exception; Wilde’s vision of the fully automated future offers incomplete and sometimes contradictory plans for the realm of necessity. However, unlike his twenty-first-century counterparts, Wilde does not hide from the implications of his antiwork politics: he directly acknowledges that within his philosophical paradigm, in which necessary labor is conceived as an imposition on human flourishing, the realm of necessity will always be a realm of unfreedom. While Wilde’s contention that “civilization requires slaves” and thus the future of the world depends on “mechanical slavery” would (or should) trouble any twenty-first-century reader, I believe this troubling assumption silently underlies twenty-first-century postwork visions.Footnote 11 Reading Wilde as part of the antiwork tradition thus serves to address what I believe is a problematic turn in contemporary radical politics. The failure of the radical postwork imaginary to address the question of necessary labor has been noted by Marxist critics like Alex Gourevitch and Aaron Benanav, both of whom defend the “better work” politics rejected by antiwork Marxists. Gourevitch notes that the conception of work as “a pure burden, to be reduced as much as possible, and, ideally, eliminated” has become “part of the left-wing common sense.”Footnote 12 As Gourevitch argues, however, this “common sense” consensus lacks a significant amount of … common sense. Gourevitch focuses his critique on the popular postwork policy of universal basic income (UBI), which would provide every individual with a guaranteed income for life; leftist proponents contend that by delinking subsistence and work, the individual would be free to choose the kind of work they wanted to pursue or to decline work altogether. While Gourevitch applauds the emphasis on personal freedom, he correctly observes that UBI “puts the distributive cart before the productive horse”: UBI assumes a massive coordination of necessary labor; simply providing income does not help if the requisite resources are not available for use or consumption. “[W]ork is only optional,” he notes, “if some are doing the necessary labor to produce the goods people buy” (20–22). Of course, for advocates of full automation, the lacuna of necessary labor is ostensibly filled by technological innovation. As Benanav shows, however, automation discourse routinely overemphasizes the role of technological development in the replacement of human labor. The postwork vision of a fully automated future is thus built on a misunderstanding of the role of “labor-substituting” and “labor-augmenting” technology in the late-capitalist present.Footnote 13 Because arguments for full automation are so reliant on extrapolation from contemporary conditions, this misreading is especially significant. Both Gourevitch and Benanav note that there is good reason why the organization of necessary labor resides at the heart of the socialist tradition. The assumption has long been that a free and just society is only possible if necessary labor is a collective responsibility shared by all. Rather than view this collective responsibility as a restriction on individual freedom, socialist thinkers have imagined participation in the realm of necessity as “a freely accepted duty” (Gourevitch 9). As succinctly expressed by Gourevitch, “We become free not by escaping necessity but by taking responsibility for it” (44). Benanav reminds us that this emancipatory vision need not be one of austerity and asceticism. Many radical thinkers have conceptualized “postscarcity” futures that do not rely on the “deus ex machina” of full automation but rather on the rational and democratic coordination of labor; this coordination becomes the material basis for what Kristin Ross has termed “communal luxury.”Footnote 14 Even as he makes the case for a rejection of antiwork politics and a return to this vision of collective responsibility, Benanav appreciates the energizing effect of the postwork vision on leftist politics. These theorists have somehow found a way to “push through the catastrophe” of late capitalism and imagine a radical alternative in which “humanity advances to the next stage in our history.”Footnote 15
Postwork thinkers have arguably revived the utopian imagination at a time when leftist politics desperately needs it. While I am critical of their vision of the postcapitalist future, their ability to imagine one at all in a world dominated by dystopian imaginaries is laudable. Wilde was writing in a different cultural moment, one in which the utopian imagination was experiencing a resurgence, and his vision of the postcapitalist future was one of many produced at the fin de siècle. But his contribution to the radical politics of his time was equally vital because he offered a contrarian utopian vision that challenged the worldview of many of his contemporaries. In an era dominated by an emphasis on vita activa (the active life), Wilde offered an impassioned defense of vita contemplativa (the contemplative life).Footnote 16 In a well-known articulation of the Victorian “gospel of work,” Thomas Carlyle declared:
The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. “Know thyself”: long enough has that poor “self” of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to “know” it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules!Footnote 17
Wilde was clearly troubled by his perception that this Carlylean injunction still shaped the Victorian zeitgeist, including its utopian imaginary. As I will discuss in the next section, this perception was arguably correct. At a time when the gospel of work remained culturally dominant, the utopian landscape needed the unsettling infusion of Wilde’s antiwork critique.
Wilde’s Antiwork Critique
In “The Mirror of Production,” Jean Baudrillard initiates his trenchant critique of Marx and Marxism with a riff on the famous opening of The Communist Manifesto:
A specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantasm of production. It sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity. The critical thought of the mode of production doesn’t touch the principle of production. All of the concepts that it articulates describe only the dialectical and historical genealogy of the contents of production; they leave its form intact. The form itself reemerges, idealized, behind the critique of the capitalist mode of production.Footnote 18
Baudrillard’s 1972 essay for Utopie, which he would expand into a book-length study, crystallized the central critique of “traditional” Marxist thought that inspired the antiwork politics of his radical contemporaries and continues to inform antiwork politics in the twenty-first century. As Baudrillard argues, the Marxist critical imaginary had been impeded from its inception by a philosophical and ethical attachment to the centrality of labor and production to human life. This attachment begins with the very definition of what it means to be human, with what Baudrillard calls “the metaphysical over-determination of man as producer.”Footnote 19 Any truly revolutionary politics would have to transgress the established boundaries of Marxism by rejecting the idea that human flourishing was linked to productivity and dismantling the political economic framework for understanding the human experience. Otherwise, the postcapitalist society would simply rebuild itself around the “productive eros,” which “pushes all alternative potentialities of meaning and exchange […] toward the process of production, accumulation, and appropriation.”Footnote 20 All the human potentialities foreclosed by capitalism would remain foreclosed. Entering the intellectual milieu of late Victorian socialism, Wilde was confronted with a revolutionary imagination shaped by what Baudrillard would identify as “the metaphysical over-determination of man as producer,” particularly the tradition most directly influenced, not by Marx, but by Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. The way in which the Victorian “gospel of work” was absorbed into late Victorian radical thought is most visible in the politics of William Morris. Following Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris believed that alienated labor was the product of an ill-formed socioeconomic system and that the collective goal should therefore be to overcome this unnatural alienation and reconnect humanity with its innate productive capacities. Surpassing his more conservative predecessors, Morris attempted to imagine the radical transformation that would be required to establish this reconnection.Footnote 21 In “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” an 1884 lecture that largely establishes the philosophical foundation for his utopian novel News from Nowhere, Morris embraces the “productive eros” that so troubles Baudrillard:
Let us grant, first, that the race of man must either labour or perish. Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by some sort or degree. Let us see, then, if she does not give us some compensation for this compulsion to labour, since certainly in other matters she takes care to make the acts necessary to the continuance of life in the individual and the race not only endurable, but even pleasurable.Footnote 22
Morris’s playful allusion here to “other matters” involving “the continuance of life” sets up what he will develop in the essay as a serious philosophical proposition. Morris does not suggest that work and sex are equivalent activities but rather that following the logic of nature, pleasure and survival may not be dichotomous. Assuming a natural potential for the integration of pleasure and labor, Morris attempts to imagine the conditions in which this merger might be achieved. He understands that work, like sex, is not pleasurable under all circumstances. Capitalism produces conditions in which virtually no work can be pleasurable. Morris thus seeks to establish the necessary preconditions for releasing pleasurable work from its captivity under capitalism, creating a world in which “all labour, even the commonest and most necessary, [is] pleasant to everybody” (296). Wilde’s antiwork politics responds to the insistence that work should be the central source of pleasure and meaning in human life.
To fully understand Wilde’s positioning against this metaphysical celebration of work, it is helpful to first understand some of its radical implications, as outlined by Morris. I will thus consider two elements of Morris’s postcapitalist vision directly opposed by Wilde’s own. The first, what Morris calls “hope of product,” is arguably the central concept of “Useful Work versus Useless Toil.” The most hopeless aspect of capitalism, for Morris, is that workers are forced into constant activity that has no social value. The middle classes squander their acquired skills and talents in the pursuit of money and social position, while a whole class of workers is forced into unproductive activity in the service of this “private war for wealth,” such as domestic servants and those engaged in the burgeoning realm of advertising, what Morris calls “the puffery of wares” (291). The working class, the only class engaged in material productivity, is forced to waste their labor producing “articles of folly and luxury” for the rich and “miserable makeshifts” for the poor (291–92). Thus, for Morris, the ability to direct one’s productivity to the needs and desires of others—rather than the “false demand” of capitalism—is a necessary postcapitalist condition (298). To be attractive to the laborer, labor “must be directed towards some obviously useful end” (299).Footnote 23 While Morris understands the attraction of useful work to be innately human, he acknowledges that radical social change may be necessary for the full appreciation of its pleasure: once socialism establishes “social morality, the responsibility of man towards the life of man” as society’s ethical foundation, the “element of obvious usefulness is all the more to be counted on in sweetening tasks otherwise irksome” (299). Morris here unsettles the image of social responsibility as burdensome and austere, arguing instead that it is an essential source of pleasurable productivity.
The second element of Morris’s postcapitalist vision that I see as essential to understanding Wilde’s countervision is the former’s merger of art and labor. It is sometimes incorrectly assumed that Morris’s only conception of pleasurable labor involves artistic handicraft. His vision is far more expansive, but the skilled artisan—who seamlessly combines utility and beauty—is, indeed, Morris’s ideal worker. The artisan represents the radical potential of what Morris in “Useful Work” calls “Popular Art,” the artistic impulse that emerges from the innate desire to imbue production with variety and pleasure (300–301). Morris’s commitment to the revival of Popular Art leads to a utopian vision in which the independent realm of art has been (at least temporarily) sacrificed. In News from Nowhere, one of Morris’s utopians informs his visitor from the past, William Guest, that art “has no name among us now, because it has become a necessary part of the labour of every man who produces”; art has become synonymous with “work-pleasure.”Footnote 24 This transformation of art into work-pleasure is most clearly seen in the production of beautiful objects for daily use, like clothing and architecture, but it also extends to Morris’s aestheticized representations of domestic and manual labor. In Morris’s postcapitalist future, art infuses everything, but it no longer exists in an independent form.
Inspired by the radical potential of human productivity, Morris sought to rescue labor from the grips of capitalist alienation. In her insightful reading of Morris and Wilde, Carolyn Lesjak reads Wilde as a “fellow traveler” on this rescue mission. Despite their “stylistic differences,” she argues, Wilde and Morris “each focus on ways of overcoming the increasing separation of labor from any notion of pleasure.” Lesjak notes that Wilde’s aestheticism and decadence “usefully put into question the productivist biases that have haunted much socialist thought since Marx,” but she does not see this critique of productivism as creating a discord between the utopian imaginaries of Morris and Wilde.Footnote 25 This sense of their political compatibility is reliant, I believe, on Lesjak’s understanding of Wilde’s critique of labor. She contends that Wilde’s utopian vision does not demand “a turn away from labor per se” but rather “liberation from the absolute necessity to work.”Footnote 26 In my reading, Wilde’s critique of productivism runs deeper than a desire to free human beings from the compulsion to labor. As I will argue, Wilde wants to liberate us not only from the necessary but also from the useful. This puts him in direct opposition to Morris, for whom usefulness was a precondition of pleasurable work. Whereas Morris seeks to reunite humanity with its productive potential, Wilde seeks to decouple human flourishing from productivity, challenging the “metaphysical over-determination of man as producer.”
Wilde develops his critique of productivist ethics throughout his oeuvre. For example, “The Critic as Artist” (1891) declares its impatience with productivism in its part 1 subtitle, “With some remarks on the importance of doing nothing.” In the quasi-Platonic dialogue between Ernest and Gilbert in part 2, Wilde employs the voice of the latter to critique the Victorian valorization of vita activa and to insist on the superiority of the Hellenistic vita contemplativa. Gilbert opines to Ernest that they “live in an age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”Footnote 27 Even in an art gallery, he notes, one is repeatedly subject to the ridiculous query “What are you doing?” rather than the infinitely more appropriate “What are you thinking?” (252). For his action-addled contemporaries, Gilbert explains, “Contemplation is the gravest sin” (252). He thus counters with the insistence that “to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy. To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of energy also” (253). In the contemplative life, to “do nothing” is not a stagnant state but a paradoxically active one, a nobler expenditure of energy than actual action. While Wilde’s articulation of this paradox materializes from his reading of both Plato and Aristotle, he perhaps most closely echoes the latter, who conceptualizes theōria, along with poêsis and praxis, as a form of human energeia (activity) and, in the Nicomachean Ethics, privileges theōria as the activity most aligned with human happiness.Footnote 28 Further, in the Politics, Aristotle claims for contemplation an active role in the active life. The active life, he argues, “need not […] be always concerned with our relations with other people, nor is intelligence always ‘active’ only when it is directed towards results that flow from action. On the contrary, thinking and speculation that are their own end and are done for their own sake are more ‘active,’ because the aim in such thinking is to do well, and therefore also, in a sense action.”Footnote 29 In Aristotle, Wilde finds a model for an active intellectual life freed from the demand for tangible outcomes.
Wilde’s critique of productivism in “Critic as Artist” is thus not primarily a defense of leisure but rather the promotion of an alternative realm of activity that is divorced from production (the expectation of outcome). Yet, while divorced from measurable outcomes, the contemplative life is not without purpose; its object is the realization of the individual’s personality and unique capacities. The contemplative life, as Gilbert explains to Ernest, “has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming” (256, emphasis original). The emphasis on “becoming” over “being” further emphasizes the active nature of contemplation. Further, as Gilbert suggests, there is one form of production compatible with this life of becoming: “It is through Art, and Art only, that we can realize our perfection” (252). The creation of art accords with the contemplative life because it is an extension of the process of self-realization and, as Wilde famously declares elsewhere, has the laudable distinction of being “quite useless” and therefore safe from the clutches of productivist imperatives.Footnote 30 As Iain Ross has aptly described it, Wilde’s conception of the contemplative life, inspired by Walter Pater’s reading of Aristotle, is “made up of a chain of theôrêtikai energeia, moments of contemplation given form by art.”Footnote 31
Significantly, Gilbert notes that this life of active contemplation and artistic production is not available to everyone. When Ernest responds to Gilbert’s defense of the contemplative life with the question, “We exist, then, to do nothing?”, Gilbert responds, “It is to do nothing that the elect exist” (253). While Gilbert insists that contemplation is undoubtedly superior to productivity, a life focused on becoming rather than doing is only available to an intellectual and presumably economic elite. It is this limitation of the contemplative life that Wilde will address in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” Following Gilbert’s defense of the contemplative life, he tells Ernest that the problem with Victorian responses to socioeconomic inequality is that they have been mired in practical action. In a preview of the oft-quoted passage from “Soul of Man,” Gilbert asserts that “England will never be civilized till she has added Utopia to her dominions. There is more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land. What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day” (257–58). “Soul of Man” is Wilde’s attempt to look beyond shortsighted philanthropy and bring the critical capacity of the contemplative life to bear on the Labor Question. More than that, however, it is Wilde’s attempt to expand access to this ideal contemplative life, to merge his elite Oxford Hellenism with a radical vision of equality. It is his attempt to imagine a socialist future in which the “metaphysical over-determination of man as producer” is replaced by the celebration of contemplative man. To do this, he will have to answer the question: if even the lowliest pleb is granted access to the contemplative life previously reserved only for the elect, then who will do all the producing? Wilde’s precocious answer is, of course: robots.
Wilde’s Fully Automated Future
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” offers one of the most impassioned rebuttals ever written to the argument that private property and economic competition are essential for the flourishing of individuality. Inverting the assumptions of liberalism (and neoliberalism), Wilde argues that it is only with the abolition of private property and the public ownership of production that “we shall have true beautiful, healthy Individualism” (128–33). Under socialism, all the human energy currently wasted on the joyless accumulation of personal wealth and the endless, miserable labor required to create these massive personal fortunes will be redirected to the actual enjoyment of life. Released from the single-minded pursuit of wealth and social advantage (for the rich) or survival (for the poor), man will finally be able to “freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him” (133). The “true personality of man” will, for the first time in human history, “grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows” (134). In Wilde’s utopian socialist vision, a collective individualism will be realized by universalizing the life of becoming advocated by Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist.”
It is this vision of the uninhibited unfolding of delightful personality that is most associated with Wildean socialism. Yet in Wilde’s vision of the postcapitalist future, this organic human potential can only grow from the soil of a bureaucratic entity called the State, “a voluntary association that will organize labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities” (139–40). The core utopian demand of “Soul of Man” is a strict bifurcation between the productive activity of the State and that of the individual: “The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful” (140). Wilde is clear that this structural demand was formed in opposition to the radical politics of contemporaries who displayed productivist biases: “I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading” (140). In particular, Wilde directly counters Morris’s utopian vision of pleasurable labor. Against Morris, Wilde insists that “many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities” and will remain so under any conditions: “Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine” (140).
In Wilde’s postcapitalist future, the State must forge an alliance with labor-saving machinery to rescue humanity from the indignity of manual labor. But it is not simply manual labor that must be automated. Wilde demands a version of what in the twenty-first century is called full automation: “All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery” (140). The productive activity from which humanity must be rescued cannot be easily classified by type; much work that might be deemed unintellectual and dull is not manual labor. And work that deals with “dreadful things” suggests a vast array of possibilities, from animal slaughter to social work to nursing. Wilde gives us only a fleeting glimpse of what this fully automated world might look like, though he presciently imagines the role of automation in the service sector, with machines that “do all sanitary services” and “run messages on wet days” (140). Wilde does not imagine that humanity must be freed from all productive activity, but such activity is kept on a tight rein; its nature must accord with leisure and contemplation. While machinery does all the necessary and unpleasant work, “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” (141). As noted above, the production of beautiful things is allowed as a natural extension of the process of becoming that is the true purpose of human existence.
Wilde was not the first Victorian radical to contend that the true realization of human potential would be reliant on the techno-bureaucratic regulation and reduction of essential labor. At one level, Wilde’s dichotomous vision in “Soul of Man” echoes Marx’s well-known distinction between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom” in Capital volume 3. Marx contends that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production.” Therefore, human liberation is reliant on “socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature […] and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature.” Only once the “associated producers” have met the physical needs of humanity through efficient and humane labor can “the development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom” begin.Footnote 32 Marx (at least the “late Marx” of Capital) and Wilde share the understanding that the full development of human potential requires freedom from the labor necessary to meet physical needs. Both also advocate the rationalized regulation of this necessary labor by a socialized productive entity as the means by which human freedom on a species scale will be achieved. As Benanav notes, this type of “post-scarcity” vision has been a recurring feature of anticapitalist politics, common to thinkers as diverse as Étienne Cabet, Peter Kropotkin, and W. E. B. Du Bois.Footnote 33
Yet Wilde’s formulation of the postcapitalist future is unusual in its insistence that humanity be freed not only from necessary but also from useful work. This difference is significant and, I would argue, definitively places Wilde’s politics within the radical antiwork tradition. His rejection of the useful is a rejection of the Victorian productivist ethics that shaped the radical politics of many of his contemporaries.Footnote 34 As discussed above, William Morris saw usefulness as perhaps the key element of pleasurable labor. For Morris, the demand that all work be useful signaled a radical recuperation of the human capacity squandered by capitalism. He also suspected that we innately enjoy our labor more when we know we are fulfilling a social need or bringing pleasure to another. It is the latter assumption that Wilde so firmly rejects. Wilde’s radical individualism demands that true human flourishing occur not only beyond the realm of necessity but also beyond the realm of social obligation. For productive activity to be truly free, it can fulfill neither a material need nor another’s desire: “An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him” (141). For Wilde, usefulness represents the demand to consider the wants and wishes of others, and this demand stunts the free growth of the human personality. The only productivity compatible with Wilde’s vision is that which is entirely self-directed, fully severed from social obligation. Wilde’s severing of productivity from social obligation is intimately related, of course, to the fact that his utopian producer is an Artist. His rejection of Morris’s embrace of usefulness is simultaneously a rejection of Morris’s sacrifice of the independent realm of Art. As discussed above, Morris imagines in News from Nowhere that the de-alienation of human labor will involve a diffusion of the artistic impulse into all forms of daily work. While Morris leaves open the possibility for the reemergence of an independent realm of art in a later stage of social development, as presented, his utopian vision absorbs Art into the harmonious landscape of useful work.
This is where Morris’s utopia arguably becomes Wilde’s dystopia. “Soul of Man” thus responds with a utopian countervision in which the entire social structure is organized to preserve the independence of the artist. As Wilde explains, the useful/beautiful production dichotomy he proposes (in which “the community by means of organizing machinery will supply the useful things” and “the beautiful things will be made by the individual”) is essential because “whenever a community or a powerful section of the community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he can do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft” (141). Art is “the unique result of a unique temperament” and “has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want” (141). For Wilde, the utopian flourishing of the human personality is synonymous with artistic expression, and artistic expression requires complete freedom from social obligation.Footnote 35As is typical of utopian literature, the unfolding of Wilde’s socialist future is intimately connected to a critique of present injustices. In Wilde’s case, however, his critique of the present has been seen to overshadow his commitment to his own utopian vision. While Regenia Gagnier acknowledges that Wilde “was sympathetic to socialism” and that “Soul of Man” “includes elements of the strange miscellany characterizing the socialist and labor platforms of the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century,” she argues that the essay “presents a more significant attack on the fin-de-siècle culture industry.”Footnote 36 Indeed, the latter half of “Soul of Man” is dedicated to an impassioned critique of the pernicious effects of modern journalism and “that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion” on artistic production in Wilde’s present (147). It is thus easy to see how Wilde’s utopian speculation might be dismissed as mere prelude to social critiques informed by his personal grievances as a controversial author and public figure.
I would argue, rather, that the specificity of Wilde’s grievances actually leads him to a more concrete vision of a postcapitalist future shaped by antiwork politics. Matthew Beaumont has rightly noted that “Soul of Man” should be considered, in the paradigm established by Ernst Bloch, a concrete rather than an abstract utopia. While the abstract utopia is driven by a desire for escapism, the concrete utopia engages critically with the present to locate potential for a better future. Wilde’s vision is concrete because he finds in the iconoclastic figure of the artist a model for future humanity. As Beaumont puts it (with a touch of wry humor that his subject would likely appreciate), “The artist, and no doubt the one called Oscar Wilde in particular, is what man ought to be.”Footnote 37 Despite the absence of a detailed utopian blueprint in “Soul of Man,” Wilde does offer us a concrete vision of the postcapitalist future, one in which all humanity will be free to engage in a life of contemplative leisure and artistic production. This realm of freedom will be supported by a fully automated State that performs not only necessary manual labor but all production that does not afford full creative or intellectual freedom. This vision is, at one level, idiosyncratically Wilde. His utopian individual looks suspiciously like an idealized nineteenth-century aesthete, and his insistence that all productive activity be severed from social obligation is arguably, in part, a response to his personal battles with that monstrous foe, Public Opinion. Yet these Wildean specificities are intimately linked to a philosophical argument at the broadest scale; in demanding full automation, Wilde stakes an ontological claim regarding the nature of what Marx termed the species-character.Footnote 38 He rejects the “metaphysical over-determination of man as producer” and the related contention that human freedom is compatible with necessary labor. In the final section of this essay, I will consider the complications that this philosophical position creates for Wilde’s postcapitalist vision. I will then explore how these complications continue to inform twenty-first-century antiwork politics and their postwork visions.
The Problem with Antiwork
Wilde is known for his willful employment of paradox. His conception of the State in “Soul of Man” might be seen as one of these paradoxes; yet this particular paradox seems to trouble Wilde. When Wilde insists that “[t]he State will make what is useful” and “the Individual will make what is beautiful,” he constructs the State as a monolithic collective entity that is comprised of humans—but not individuals. To de-individualize humans who engage in the work of the State, dismissing them as an undifferentiated mass of human labor power, was arguably not Wilde’s intention. He soundly rejects the “industrial-barrack system” of “Authoritarian Socialism” (131).Footnote 39 His State is a “voluntary association” akin to Marx’s “associated producers.” As David Goodway has established, Wilde was heavily influenced by anarchist thought, including that of Peter Kropotkin, and “Soul of Man” was recognized by anarchists like Kropotkin as espousing genuinely anarchist principles. Goodway himself reads “Soul of Man” as “unambiguously anarchist” in its rejection of central governance.Footnote 40 Wilde’s postcapitalist vision no doubt expresses anarchist commitments, though there is no clear indication that Wilde does not envision the State as a centralized entity.Footnote 41 He does, however, pointedly reject the idea of compulsion: “Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and it will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind” (131–32). While the State might be a centralized, bureaucratic entity, Wilde insists that it has no power or authority to impose work requirements. The State must therefore organize all useful production while still allowing everyone to choose their own employment. As in Friedrich Engels’s well-known formulation, “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the processes of production.”Footnote 42
The fascinating thing about this passage is that it seems to contradict Wilde’s concrete image of a utopian society in which the individual is freed from all noncreative production. The idea that useful work could be both freely chosen and “good for others” challenges his later contention that humans cannot produce what is best in themselves if they must consider the wants and needs of others. This one passage seems to contain a different utopian vision—one that looks more Morrisian—in which all productive activity, even the most useful, potentially has value for the individual. The context of this passage, however, suggests that Wilde is trying to address a specific paradox created by the merging of his anarchist principles with his philosophical privileging of the contemplative life: if the realm of necessity (and even utility) is ultimately a realm of unfreedom, then must we accept that humans will always have to engage in labor that is, to some degree, coerced and oppressive? Here, Wilde attempts to answer this question by softening his rejection of useful labor, suggesting that work performed in the realm of necessity might be a “good in itself” and compatible with human flourishing.
I believe, however, that he ultimately rejects this answer in favor of another. Wilde instead chooses full automation as the answer to his paradox of the State, a solution more compatible with his philosophical position. He returns to the idea of necessary labor as inherently unfree, arguing that machinery must perform “all the necessary and unpleasant work” because “civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends” (141). Here, we see that Wilde’s demand for full automation is fueled not by technophilic optimism but by his commitment to the Hellenistic political philosophy he champions in “Critic as Artist.” In his evocation of Greek slave society, Wilde notably avoids the common Victorian practice of employing slavery as a rhetorical proxy for all forms of unfreedom without reference to its concrete historical manifestations. As Hannah Arendt outlines in The Human Condition, the ancient Greeks justified the need for slavery on just the grounds Wilde suggests: “To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity, and this enslavement was inherent in the condition of human life. Because men were dominated by the necessities of life, they could win their freedom only through the domination of those whom they subjected to necessity by force.” Ancient Greek slavery, in contrast to its later manifestations, was not “an instrument of exploitation for profit” but rather “the attempt to exclude labor from the condition of man’s life.”Footnote 43 Wilde realizes that his utopian State, even if it is a voluntary association, does not solve the problem of human enslavement to necessity. It is only in excluding labor entirely from the human condition that our species can truly flourish, and this, Wilde contends, will always require some form of domination. Civilization requires slaves.
Wilde’s conception of “mechanical slavery” tellingly echoes an Aristotelian thought experiment regarding the replacement of human slavery with automation.Footnote 44 In the Politics, Aristotle conceptualizes the enslaved person as a type of tool. He notes that “any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools.” To enforce his equivalence of slaves and servants with physical tools, he suggests that we imagine “that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need,” like the famous automata of Daedalus and Hephaestus. Then, simply, “master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves.”Footnote 45 Benanav aptly labels Aristotle “a reverse automation theorist” because he uses “the absence of self-moving machines” to justify slavery.Footnote 46 Wilde adapts this justification of slavery to formulate a demand for full automation. If necessary labor is slavery, incompatible with our species being, then the way to eliminate slavery is simply to replace the human tool with a mechanical one. Interestingly, while much of the Victorian discourse of automation was centered on industrial technologies, Aristotle may have suggested to Wilde a broader scope for automation that incorporates what we now call artificial intelligence, nonhuman tools that would themselves “perceiv[e] the need” that humans required of them.Footnote 47 For, certainly, Wilde’s utopian vision is reliant on more than the stationary machinery of the factory: civilization requires robots.
Wilde’s vision of full automation was no doubt inspired by an established Victorian discourse that condemned the misapplication of technological advancements to increase the exploitation of labor rather than reduce the burden of labor.Footnote 48 In “Soul of Man,” Wilde repeats a common observation that the widespread distress caused by large-scale industrial mechanization was not inevitable but rather the result of privatized production for profit. Under current conditions, one capitalist benefits from “a machine which does the work of five hundred men” while those five hundred unemployed men must starve, but if this labor-saving machine were communal property, “every one would benefit by it” (140). Further, his postcapitalist vision is certainly not unique in imagining a role for technology in making necessary labor more efficient and reducing working hours. There is even a role for mechanical production in Morris’s artisanal utopia. However, in the postcapitalist visions of Wilde’s contemporaries, the targeted introduction of mechanization is generally imagined as part of a holistic effort to make work attractive, rather than a widespread effort to eliminate necessary labor. Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (Reference Kropotkin1892), published just a year after “Soul of Man,” is a paradigmatic example. In discussing the socialization of agriculture under anarchist communism, Kropotkin envisions that the “technical skills of the worker accustomed to deal with complicated machinery” will combine with technological innovations like the “steam plough” to create an efficient method for handling the “rough work” of soil preparation. The human labor that remains to be done will be not only bearable but pleasurable for those who undertake it: “men, women and children will gladly turn to the labour of the fields, when it is no longer a slavish drudgery, but has become a pleasure, a festival, a renewal of health and joy.”Footnote 49 For Kropotkin, engaging in perhaps the most necessary of labor, the production of food, can be a joyful experience if the physical burden of the labor is eased by technological innovation. To return to Wilde’s phrasing, “disturbing dirt” is not an imposition on human dignity if the working conditions are humane.
What separates Wilde from most of his radical contemporaries—and the reason why I argue that we should consider him within the antiwork/postwork tradition—is his insistence on the unconditional unfreedom of necessary labor, captured so starkly by his evocation of ancient Greek slave society. For Wilde, the realm of necessity is always a realm of unfreedom, and any human labor required to sustain it will always be unfree. For me, the dichotomy between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom is always, to some extent, haunted by this problematic devaluing of necessary labor. But while Marx and other postscarcity theorists insist on the dichotomy, they also resist, in the words of Marx, dehumanizing necessary and “mundane” labor; while this labor may not be the ultimate expression of our species being, it can—and should—be performed in “conditions most favourable to, and worthy of […] human nature.” Wilde’s philosophical privileging of the contemplative life, of being over doing, encourages a wholesale rejection of necessary labor that ultimately results in its dehumanizing equation with slavery. For Wilde, the only way to address the inevitability of this dehumanization—and the attendant domination required to enforce it—is to demand full automation. The ethical concern this raises is perhaps obvious. If full automation is not literally realizable—with some necessary or boring or dangerous or otherwise undesirable labor persistently resisting automation—the humans required to perform this labor are still subject to dehumanization and domination. Twenty-first-century demands for full automation raise the same ethical concern. Their vision of human liberation, like Wilde’s, is reliant on severing the connection between humanity and the realm of necessity. As a result, their postcapitalist visions have little to say about the working conditions and social value of the humans who will perform necessary labor in their technophilic futures.
This disappearing of human labor is perhaps most apparent in the text referenced in this essay’s title, Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. I have chosen to focus on Bastani because his utopian manifesto interestingly echoes both Wilde’s Hellenism and his aestheticism. Yet the core philosophies and logics that structure Bastani’s manifesto are present in the more staid texts of the antiwork/postwork tradition, like those discussed in this essay’s introduction. Like Srnicek and Williams, Bastani presents the demand for full automation as radicalism that is utopian and scientific (to borrow Engels’s famous distinction), a politics grounded in the real conditions of production that nevertheless insists on the necessity of a utopian horizon toward which radical politics must be oriented. For Bastani, this horizon is defined as fully automated luxury communism (FALC). Bastani’s conception of communism reveals a foundational ambiguity in postwork discourse: what exactly is the “work” of postwork? What exactly is humanity being liberated from? Bastani notes that the communism of FALC is a kind of shorthand for “a society in which work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance and where labour and leisure blend into one another.”Footnote 50 Here, we find that the slippery semantic distinction between work and labor is at the heart of a larger ambiguity. For Wilde, labor most closely aligns with unfreedom and must unequivocally be eliminated, while work holds a larger potential and is perhaps even subject to recuperation. For Bastani, work is most directly aligned with unfreedom. Postwork thinkers often propose to limit their definition of work to paid employment. This is the case for Srnicek and Williams, who insist that by work, they mean “our jobs—or wage labour: the time and effort we sell to someone else in return for an income.”Footnote 51 Bastani operates under the same definitional framework. Yet this definition does not hold in Bastani, just as it also quickly falters in Srnicek and Williams. The element of radical postwork politics concerned with the transition from capitalism to postcapitalism does focus on the elimination of wage or salaried labor: the way to dismantle the capitalist economy is to sever the dependency of the individual on paid employment through the combination of systematic automation and supportive polices like universal basic income (UBI). But postwork thinkers are also invested in imagining a world beyond the transition, and this postcapitalist world is shaped by an antiwork politics that far exceeds a critique of wage labor under capitalism. In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, the elimination of “work” ultimately equates to the severing of humanity from the realm of necessity, as it does in “Soul of Man.” This becomes clear in what I believe is Bastani’s misalignment of his own conception of communism with that of Marx. Bastani contends that, for Marx, the ultimate goal of communism is for humanity to permanently “exit” the realm of necessity, ultimately superseding the dichotomy between necessity and freedom that he establishes in Capital volume 3 (54). Bastani bases this reading on a well-known passage from the Critique of the Gotha Program, in which Marx describes “a higher phase of communist society” in which “labour has become not only a means to life but life’s prime want” and “all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly” (qtd. in Bastani 55). For Bastani, this succinct vision of the communist future mirrors his own fully automated luxury communism. He argues that, for Marx, communism “was marked not only by an absence of economic conflict and work but by a spontaneous abundance similar to the Golden Age of Hesiod or Telecleides, or the biblical Eden” (54). In this postscarcity world of effortless abundance, work has not been entirely eliminated, but what work does exist is no longer tied to the imperative of species survival and has thus become “more akin to play” (55).
The intention of this essay is not to parse Marx, but Bastani’s reading of Marx here is telling. Arguably, Marx does not envision a permanent exit from the realm of necessity, an Edenic world in which abundance is achieved without human effort. Though Marx does indicate a collapse of the dichotomy he establishes in Capital volume 3, he suggests a merger between the realms of necessity and freedom (as we see in Morris), rather than the supersession of the former by the latter. In translating Marx’s contention that labor will become “life’s prime want” into “work becoming more akin to play,” Bastani hollows out this recuperative vision of productive activity as the primary source of meaning in human life. For Bastani, full automation leads to a postcapitalist world of “spontaneous abundance,” in which technological innovation meets human needs while humans embark on lives of luxury and leisure. As in “Soul of Man,” productive activity does not disappear but has been severed from both necessity and social obligation, allowing for the unimpeded expression of the Individual. Bastani explains FALC as “the politics of the self-help guru—be precisely who you want to be—embedded within a broader program for social change” (186). While Bastani does not directly link his antiwork politics to the Hellenistic conception of the vita contemplativa as Wilde does, Fully Automated Luxury Communism is infused with references that echo Wilde’s own Hellenistic utopianism, suggesting a philosophical affinity that is never made explicit. In the passage cited in the previous paragraph, Bastani equates Marxist communism to the Golden Age conceptualized by Hesiod, which, like the prelapsarian Eden, is imagined as existing prior to the introduction of labor into the human condition. Antiwork politics is thus buttressed by the mythical conception of labor as universal human curse, which can only be lifted by full automation. It is Bastani’s citation of Aristotle, however, that creates the most suggestive link to Wilde’s Hellenism. As an epigraph for the section of the book in which Bastani discusses the utopian potential of full automation, he selects the passage from Aristotle’s Politics cited above, in which Aristotle notes that the only way to imagine a world without slaves is to imagine a world populated by robots. Unlike Wilde, Bastani does not acknowledge the logical conclusion of the philosophical position that prompts Aristotle’s thought experiment: civilization requires slaves.
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” formulated a powerful critique of late Victorian socialism, which often fused a Marxist valorization of labor with a uniquely Victorian philosophical privileging of work. In particular, I believe Wilde astutely identified the subtly repressive elements of Morris’s pastoral utopia, responding with an impassioned defense of the need for an independent realm of creative and intellectual production that is not wedded to utility. Likewise, twenty-first-century postwork Marxists have productively disrupted a pattern of localized leftist reformism that Srnicek and Williams appropriately identify as “folk politics.” They have rightly insisted on the need for a radical utopian imaginary that shapes policy in the present. Yet, in addition to the essential critical work performed by Wilde and his twenty-first-century counterparts, their radical imaginaries also perform a troubling disappearing act that marginalizes or erases the individuals who perform the labor most essential to our survival. While I have argued that “Soul of Man” should be understand as a concrete utopia that expresses serious political commitments, Wilde was not interested in developing actionable policy. This is not the case for twenty-first-century antiwork Marxists, who are invested in doing the difficult work of translating their utopian imaginaries into policy. Unfortunately, as we have seen in Gourevitch’s reading of UBI, the limitations of the antiwork/postwork imaginary are often displayed in the concrete policies they propose. To conclude the essay, I will look at just one example from Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
One of the essential species challenges addressed by Bastani is the provision of care for an aging human population. Because of an impressive increase in life expectancy and a steady reduction in fertility rates, the elderly have become an increasingly larger percentage of the population. (This issue obviously varies widely by nation, but the overall trend is a global one.) As Bastani correctly identifies, this has led to a care crisis: existing government programs and private care networks are not equipped to address this increase in demand. In keeping with a core tenet of FALC—that information wants to be free and its open availability will lead to a postscarcity future—Bastani’s proposed solution to the elder care crisis is gene editing. Our human biology, he asserts, is “set to be transformed as radically as labour with automation” (151). He explains that with the introduction of new techniques, like CRISPR-Cas9, gene editing is becoming cheaper and more widely available. As with other aspects of full automation, our political goal should be to demand further development of and open access to this medical technology. Bastani then presents his utopian vision: the widespread adoption of gene editing would allow us not only to eliminate thousands of genetic disorders but also to potentially reprogram our bodies to resist viruses like HIV and degenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s or even create leaner muscles and stronger bones (152). Gene editing would “not only allow us to keep pace with the unique health challenges presented by societal ageing but even surpass them” (157).
Gene editing may not be a labor-saving technology in the same way as automated check-outs at the grocery store, but the same logic is operative here. While Bastani does not discuss it at any length, the labor question is at the core of the elder care crisis. In the United States, the workers at the forefront of this crisis—nursing home and assisted-living facility aides as well as home health-care workers—are notoriously underpaid, overworked, and culturally undervalued. This makes it difficult to recruit and retain the workforce necessary to care for our aging population. Additionally, because of the unsustainable expense of long-term senior care, family members are often forced to labor as unpaid caregivers. Bastani’s solution is consistent with the principles of FALC: use technology to eliminate the need for this labor. This solution is not completely ridiculous; the core demand to make the most advanced medical technologies available to everyone who needs them is undoubtedly just. But—in addition to the dystopian specter of gene editing’s eugenic applications and the related question of whether everyone would want to utilize this technology—this utopian vision demands nothing for the care workers on whom we are so dependent and will undoubtedly continue to depend. Their only hope is to eventually become obsolete, to be freed to perform work that is not so intimately tied to human necessity and is instead “more akin to play.”
In Slaves and Other Objects, Page duBois notes that Athenaeus compiles multiple examples of an ancient Greek utopian imaginary based on the same premise as Aristotle’s thought experiment, in which animated objects eliminate the need for human slavery. She aptly observes, “In a world without slaves, the imaginable, utopian alternative to slave labor is not work by the free but labor performed by inanimate objects themselves.”Footnote 52 The demand for full automation—both from Oscar Wilde and his twenty-first-century counterparts—arguably suffers from this same failure of critical imagination. We may well be emerging from a period dominated by what Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism,” in which “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”Footnote 53 It seems that now, however, it is easier to imagine a world run by robots than a world in which the human labor necessary for our survival as a species is performed in a manner that fully recognizes the humanity of the worker. The latter is undoubtedly the more challenging task for our collective utopian imaginary, but it is also the most vital. There is much essential human work to be done to address the crises we face as a species, and capitalism is simply not designed to meet these challenges. We need a radical imaginary that does not sever us from necessity and survival but more urgently connects us to it.
Developing this imaginary involves unsettling, to return to Gourevitch, the naturalized conception of work as “a pure burden, to be reduced as much as possible, and, ideally, eliminated.” “Soul of Man” feels distinctly more modern than the two major utopian novels to which it directly responds, News from Nowhere and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), and not just because of its prescient vision of a world in which automation has infused every sector of the economy. Wilde’s antiwork politics feel more at home in the twenty-first century than the “productivist ethics” of contemporaries like Morris and Bellamy, whose postcapitalist visions are both shaped (albeit in quite different ways) by the Victorian “gospel of work.” Wilde’s rejection of this gospel feels right: the idea that work should be a conduit for the full realization of our human capacities and the means by which we shape the world around us rings of false consciousness. The dangling carrot of meaningful work seems so obviously to be a capitalist ideological tool for the exploitation of labor. Yet, as Gourevitch observes, when it comes to work, “capitalism seizes upon something true about us and distorts it”: the “reasonable, latently socialist sense that we should do our share and that we can get something out of work” is distorted by capitalist imperatives, but we should not concede that this capitalist distortion is the only possible realization of our relationship to work (47). In its best manifestations, the expansive discourse that is sometimes called the Victorian “gospel of work” did exactly this: it refused to allow that the capitalist distortion of work was the only possible reality. Perhaps those earnest Victorians were onto something.
