I remember Martin Amis saying in an interview a couple of years before Tony Blair became prime minister, “We’re all Labour now.” I think by “all” he meant all right-thinking people, and by “Labour” he meant opposed to the Tory government of the day. At the time I bridled a little at Amis’s crazed inclusiveness – I wasn’t sure I wanted to belong to a club that apparently accepted everyone as a member. Not, I hasten to add, that I could claim to be “tribal Labour”. True, I’d voted for them in every election since I’d reached my majority, while my parents were vociferous, if not especially active, leftwingers.

My father, Peter Self, who was, oxymoronically, a “political scientist”, wrote numerous books, which, while often technical in character, were nonetheless informed by his own rather gentle and utopian socialism. My mother, whose given name was Rosenbloom, grew up in New York in the 1920s and 30s and had run with a fairly racy crowd – one including a fair number of Communist party members. In the 1960s the family home in North London offered refuge for the draft-dodging children of her American friends, and I well remember her breathless account of the tumultuous 1968 demonstration against the Vietnam war in Grosvenor Square. A feminist before the term was in general use, in the 1970s she joined consciousness-raising groups and campaigns, and in the early 1980s she took part in the women’s camp at Greenham Common.

My socialism, imbibed with my mother’s milk and my father’s ruminations, was at once of the same slightly wishy-washy oppositional character suggested by Amis’s remark, and wreathed about by rather more dangerously seductive visions of the wholesale transformation of the social order by whatever means necessary. By the time I was at university and studying politics myself, I certainly understood there was a major problem with being a socialist: namely, the incommensurability of the means available and the ends desired. There were still quite a few Marxists at Oxford in those days – Terry Eagleton and his clique were seemingly bolted to the same table in the King’s Arms the entire time I was an undergraduate – but while I was silly and naive enough to believe in the purifying, energising effects of violent revolution, I wasn’t obtuse enough to think of dialectical materialism as anything more than a powerful heuristic. The grotesquely botched real-time “socialist experiment” that was the USSR was still under way, and in common with all right-thinking leftists I was quick to decry the excesses of Russian totalitarianism.

Oscar Wilde, c1893. Photograph: Roger Viollet/Getty Images

However, before 1989 it was still possible to cleave to the idea of utopian socialism. A vision of the city on the hill could serve as an inspiration for piecemeal and incremental reform. In his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891) Oscar Wilde puts this rather well: acknowledging the objection that his vision of a happy realm peopled by aesthetical and egalitarian individualists is impractical, he writes: “It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out.” Wilde was ever-dedicated to paradox – but this was one he sought to resolve with the familiar plaint: “Human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.” As for the social conditions that obtain: “It is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.”

Looking back on my political activism of the 1970s and 80s, there was a lot of refusing to accept existing conditions on the basis that they were “wrong and foolish”. We wouldn’t accept the cold war and the threat of MAD (mutually assured destruction) underpinning it; we wouldn’t accept the Thatcherite attack on the unions and the consequent privatisation of public enterprises; and we wouldn’t even accept the testimony of our senses when we saw the people surrounding us whipped into an acquisitive frenzy by the City’s Big Bang. I had been part of an anarchist collective at Oxford that published a free sheet, Red Herring – I’d bussed up to Liverpool to stand on the dockers’ picket lines; I had the donkey jacket, the crew cut, the boots – and, most important of all, the attitude.

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I must have first read “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” in my teens, when I was going on Anti-Nazi League marches and sampling meetings of leftwing groupuscules in search of a congenial home. I never joined any of them, but I loved Wilde’s essay – loved its uncompromising approach to the crushing problem of social and economic inequality, inequality I could see increasing all around me in the 1980s, while the economy began to be irrigated with funny money as manufacturing productivity declined in an inverse correlation to property prices. Wilde takes no prisoners from the very outset: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others.” It’s a very Wildean, quasi-epigrammatic reversal – the reader expects something worthy, collectivist and altruistic, instead he gets something that’s irreverent, individualistic and apparently selfish. He goes on to extend his sympathy to those among the fortunate who are moved by the plight of the poor, before abruptly withdrawing it: “… their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.” It makes you wonder what he would have made of our Red Nosed era in which culture, charity and all manner of medical and social needs are kickstarted by rattling the begging box and chugging the small change of our compassion.

I sometimes wonder when I stopped thinking of myself as a socialist – as with so much else, I’d like to blame Blair

I, too, have had a visceral hatred of charity – I, too, have agreed with Wilde in believing it demeans its recipients, while its chief beneficiaries are the donors, who by so giving are relieved of the burden of their own conscience. Even around the turn of the millennium, when I reread Wilde’s essay, I still found it hugely to my taste. His refusal to abandon his high-flown and highly individualistic aestheticism in the face of “the social question” made him an avant-garde “champagne socialist”. No one could’ve been more suitable for this role than he, who bubbled away his evenings in Simpson’s in the Strand or the Cafe Royal, who spent royally when he had money and borrowed regally when he didn’t, and whose contacts with the working class – with the exception of servants – were at once amatory and pecuniary.

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I sometimes wonder when precisely I stopped thinking of myself as a socialist – as with so much else, I’d like to blame Blair for it; I’d like to tub-thumpingly decry his emasculation of the Labour party; his resistance to true industrial democracy; his personal greed and public duplicity – and, most of all, his enthusiastic participation in the Bush administration’s self-deluding “military interventions”. I think many, if not all, socialists of my stamp felt the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq as colossal shocks that exposed how bodged-up our belief systems really were. It was as if our consciences were forced into a bizarre PE drill, and Iraq was the vaulting horse we failed to clear. We leapt up, inflated by Robin Cook’s ethical foreign policy – only to come crashing down crotch-first on Blair’s hypocritical and leathery realpolitik.

Will Self at the 15 February 2003 anti-war rally in Hyde Park, London. Photograph: Dan Chung/Guardian

Wilde says very little about an internationalist dimension to the socialism he proposes. Besides, his utopian socialism transpires not in any defined historical moment but in the sort of back-to-the-future society envisaged by William Morris in his neo-medievalist fantasy novel, News from Nowhere, which was published a year before Wilde’s intervention. Morris sees little need to sort out the practicalities of his imaginary world. While its egalitarian individualists are free to indulge themselves in arts, crafts and social intercourse, the grunt work is done for them by mechanisation. Wilde takes the same line: “Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.”

It seems strange to me now, typing this as I am on a machine assembled in the giant sweatshops of a nominally communist state, that Wilde could have been quite so optimistic about technology. After all, the evidence of what mechanisation was doing to people (rather than what they were doing with it) was all around him in 1891 in the form of maimed bodies and minds imprisoned by repetitive tasks. But then Wilde was writing a couple of decades before the terrifying ironic reversal of the first world war, which saw one era of globalisation terminate in the assembly line of death snaking across Flanders. He also writes: “The very violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a moment,” and we might forgive him this cosmically irresponsible silliness on the basis that the bloodbath of the Bolshevik revolution was in the future, too. Wilde wrote at a time when the oppression imposed by the moneyed on the poor was a form of violence, so it’s possible to understand his revolutionary enthusiasm as part of a politics of ressentiment, whereby the slaves appropriate the masters’ whip hand.

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The problem for all socialists who glorify the revolutionary moment – and let’s not forget, violent revolution is absolutely integral to the Marxist worldview – is that once the shackles of social control are loosed, and the overseer’s lash is seized, that lash begins to rise and fall indiscriminately. Wilde believed it was possible to engineer a completely egalitarian society populated by the naturally beneficent. Yet almost the exact opposite of what he writes about the mutability of human nature is the case: who among us, observing the absolutely reliable proclivity humans have for killing each other in the name of abstract ideas, can fail to conclude there’s a streak of bloodthirstiness running through our natures like BRIGHTON through rock?

William Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere, 1893. Photograph: William Morris Gallery

Wilde seeks to define the individual type of the coming socialist age: “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.” It might be argued that in rejecting the institutions of marriage and family, while taking himself – a quasi-closeted gay artist in hypocritical late-Victorian England – as the representative type of the coming age, Wilde was genuinely prophetic. After all, whatever else we may say about contemporary Britain, there’s little doubt that many people perceive it as a society in which they can be themselves sexually, individually and creatively; that this self-realisation is fully articulated within capitalist metrics would presumably be shocking even to Wilde. Soothsayer or not, he never imagined the pink pound would become legal tender.

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With his hit West End plays and his extravagant lifestyle, Wilde was not only an early champagne socialist, he was also an early member of a nascent social class – one now known as the precariat. The modern characterisation of this class is that its members are insecure and shiftless – lacking either the job security and collectivism of the old working class, or the capital of the traditional middle class. Wilde, however, with his high earnings and his flamboyance, made of precariousness something aristocratic; he was, if you’ll forgive the coinage, a precaristocrat. In the years since 1979, during which the old institutions conducive to socialistic thinking (if not socialism itself) have crumbled, hundreds of thousands have been press-ganged into the precariat. And, it needs to be said, some of us have done very well out of the new dispensation – we too are precaristocrats. How can I claim to have any solidarity with the less well-off when I’ve profited from precisely the economic conditions that make their lives so hard?

No, champagne socialism is a nonsense that was scarcely effervescent to begin with, and has long since gone flat. The champagne socialist’s line that the poor should be raised to his level rather than he being reduced to theirs, is only an inversion of the neoliberal’s crazed theory of wealth-creation, depending as it does on some mysterious mechanism of “trickle up”. Without a willingness to forgo higher incomes right here and right now, and join the charmless and unrefined poor in their struggle for economic justice, the middle-class socialist’s solidarity doesn’t really amount to a hill of beans – let alone a hill of beans with a city on it. No, the champagne socialist, if he has any integrity at all, looks to a strongly redistributive progressive taxation system, because he understands – as De Tocqueville sagely observed – that the law exists to restrain our worst impulses, not encourage our best.

Wilde writes: “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” Yet for him, in his essay, the two are conflated, because for all utopians, no matter how anarchistic they may think themselves to be, the premise underlying their brave new worlds is that everyone cravenly become exactly like them – and while I myself am perfectly happy to emulate Wilde, I’m not sure being a flamboyant literary figure is likely to fulfil everyone’s needs, nor lie within everyone’s ability. No, I’m no longer a socialist if to be one is to believe that a socialist utopia is attainable by some collective feat of will – but I remain a socialist, if by “socialism” is understood an antipathy to vested interests and privileges neither deserved nor earned, and a strong desire for a genuinely egalitarian society. And that is why, for the first time since 1997, I will be voting Labour in a general election.

• Will Self wrote the opening lecture delivered at A Wilde Weekend by Lough Ernest festival in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland.