Fully Automated Luxury Socialism: Oscar Wilde’s Antiwork Politics

In the twenty-first century, leftist politics has taken a turn toward antiwork philosophy and postwork imaginaries. These politics critique not only the work-centered capitalist society but also challenge the “productivist ethics” of other leftist traditions. A popular variation of this antiwork/postwork politics calls for full automation, the replacement of as much human labor as possible with technological alternatives. Positioning work as a realm of unfreedom, these thinkers argue that human liberation can only be achieved in a world with less work. This article reads Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891) as a precocious articulation of a postwork imaginary that demands full automation. In response to contemporaries like William Morris, who argued that capitalism had severed humanity from a natural affinity for work, Wilde expresses an antiwork position, arguing that humanity was made for contemplative leisure and creative expression. Thus, automated labor becomes a key element of his utopian vision. Though Wilde formulates a necessary critique of a Victorian radical politics that was decidedly prowork, his postwork utopia is based on a troubling premise: “civilization requires slaves.” In reading twenty-first-century postwork thinkers alongside Wilde, we find the same premise still subtly operative within this politics.