Voting and the Illusion of Democracy

Democracy is not possible under capitalism. The very nature of the beast is that capital,  profit, is concentrated in the hands of an engorged minority who use it to further enrich  themselves at the expense of the vast majority of the world’s people, and to the detriment  of planet Earth herself.  Poor and working class people cannot participate in this wealth-driven process because  we have been locked out of the all-important ability to acquire sufficient wealth to  determine our own destiny. Still, under capitalism, a system that can more accurately be  called “profitism”, we have been indoctrinated to believe with . . .

Safiya Bukhari - Enemies and Friends: Resolving Contradictions

Enemies and Friends: Resolving Contradictions

The following is an excerpt from Safiya Bukhari’s The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting For Those Left Behind. This section is titled “Enemies and Friends: Resolving Contradictions and it was written some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s, during a time where those who had been targeted by COINTELPRO were trying to recover their relationships and figure out how they would be able to continue to do political work together. We have written extensively about the environment of mistrust created around the imprisonment of Geronimo ji Jaga. That environment contributed significantly to the solutions that Safiya offers in this work.  . . .