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06/04/2005: "Winter 2005 of Souls"

The winter edition of Souls opens with this quote from W.E.B. Du Bois:


We are prisoners of propaganda. The people of the United States have become completely sold to that method of conducting industry which has been so powerful and triumphant in the world for two centuries that Americans regard it as the only normal way of life. We regard the making of things and their purchase and sale for private profit as the chief end of living. We look on painting and poetry as harmless play. We regard literature as valuable only as handmaiden to industry. We teach business as a science when it is only an art of legal theft. We regard advertising as a profession when it teaches the best way to lie. We consider the unselfish sacrifice of one to the progress of all as wasted effort. Wealth is the height of human ambition even when we have no idea how to spend it, except to make more wealth or to waste it in harmful or useless ostentation. We want high profits and high wages even if most of the world starves.

Putting aside questions of right, and suspecting all our neighbors as being as selfish as we ourselves are, we have adopted a creed of wholesale selfishness. We believe that, if all people work for thier own selfigh advantage, the whole world will be the best of possible worlds. This is the rat race upon which we are set, and we are suspicious and afraid of folk who oppose this program, and plead for the old kindliness, the new use of power and machine for the good of the unfortunate and the welfare of all the world of every race and color.

Essay entitled "The Negro and Socialism" 1958.