Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde is amazing... his plays are hilarious, witty and satirical. And his essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" is absolute poetry. It can be found online at http://www.authorslibrary.org/b/slman10.htm but I'll include a few of the better parts here...

He writes that: "The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them."

He goes on talking about individualism... how capitalism (possession of means of production by a few) has caused so many people to work in dead end jobs, and for artists to become not artists but craftsmen. Artists, he says, work for themselves, and not with concern of what others want or not. As soon as the artist starts worrying about what will sell, or what others think, then he becomes instead a craftsmen. Capitalism has made concern for other people's opinions an economic necessity.

The state, he writes, should be the one to make what is useful. It should distribute and produce necessary commodities, through the use of machines which do the work which it used to take hundreds of men to do. Then men would be free to pursue the arts and what is important to them.

On the other hand, the state should get out of the business of governing. We don't need anyone telling us what to do. He writes that "All modes of government are failures. Depostism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."

As for crime, he writes that "when there is no punishment at all, crime with 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. What are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, not sin, is the parent of the modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psycholigical point of view. THey are not marvellous Macbeths or terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would do if they had not got enough to eat."

There, that should be enought to whet your appetite. Go read his article.