True Leap Press P.O. Box 408197 Chicago IL, 60640

www.trueleappress.com

True Leap Press is a radical publishing collective based in Chicago, Illinois. We support the intellectual struggle and advocate for the building of mass- based projects for anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-patriarchal political education. Our collective encourages any-and-all forms of revolt and insurrection against global anti-blackness, white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. We also aim to facilitate the growth of a progressive political consciousness that is deliberately anti-patriotic and against all forms of U.S. nationalism.

In the coming years, we hope to increase our number of publications, establish infrastructure for printing and distribution, and grow our capacity to work across prison walls. Our current print publication is entitled PROPTER NOS. It offers a platform for Black and radical antiracist theoretical and cultural work — such as poetry, short essays, experimental writing, artwork — and will also increasingly serve as a source of commentary and analysis from imprisoned activists and grassroots abolitionist organizations.

Since April 2017, our publishing collective has distributed over 200 copies of PN I and II to imprisoned comrades across the country (at no charge, printed on stock paper, using black toner, in grayscale). We have ran advertisements and our communiqué in the newsletters of a handful of allied groups, such as Black and Pink: Chicago and in The Abolitionist, published by Critical Resistance (1904 Franklin St # 504, Oakland, CA 94612). These ads in turn attract requests for educational materials made by these groups’ incarcerated readership. Feel free to circulate this catalogue amongst your networks. We also have some imprisoned comrades making photocopies and passing out the literature we send on their own, without any request to do so. This is fantastic news! We encourage more to take up this task.

Word is, imprisoned organizers in PA, CA, TX, WA, and IL are using PROPTER NOS as a prompt for ad hoc study groups. If you know anyone incarcerated who would like a free issue, please print out and get them this catalogue today. If you know of or work for a bookstore, info shop, or library who would like to sell or house a few hard copies, we are more than happy to split the sale on consignment. Just hit us up thru the (e)mails. All funds collected go toward future printing and distribution.

Finally, we are a group that offers free political education resources to everyone who requests it in good faith. WE DO NOT GIVE LEGAL ADVICE OR SUPPORT. We do not have the capacity to offer mutual aid in that way. WE ARE ALSO NOT AN ACTIVIST ORGANIZATION. Sharing intellectual resources is our collective’s primary objective at the moment, and likely in the foreseeable future.

2019/2020 Catalogue

Published works Propter Nos Vol 2. Iss 1 available for free download on our website

Propter Nos Vol 1. Iss 1

Insurgency/Exhaustion (2017)

Propter Nos Vol 2. Iss 2

Reflections on the

“Movement Moment” Anti-/Non (2018) (2016) Publication description

Referring to the collective sense of “We” that inspires the mobilization and identity formation of a People, the Latin phrase “Propter Nos” is the title we chose for our first publication. This is because we believe that one of the central tasks of building consciousness amongst colonized, imprisoned, working class, and poor peoples is to build spaces where a core set of political principles can be cultivated amidst the contradictions and antagonisms inherent to revolutionary movement building.

True Leap Press believes that establishing a clearinghouse for the formulation of a vision of mass insurgency among differently situated communities of struggle is a necessary (and urgent) task in the present moment of white nationalist resurgence and patriotic liberal counterrevolution. We therefore obstinately oppose the mythology of U.S. exceptionalism and white manifest destiny, and do not presume that American liberal democracy is an inherent “good.” Instead, we hope PROPTER NOS will serve as a forum for works that invigorate a different sense of common political consciousness, one rooted in the historical experiences of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and movements mobilizing against the white capitalist civilization and nation-building project of the United States.

The works included in each volume of PROPTER NOS loosely operate in accordance with the ’s principle of “unity-criticism-unity.” This concept refers the “process of the members of a group, unit or organization united on a set of principles and objectives to struggle internally, behind closed doors among themselves.” This process is carried out in practice by working together with comrades, “observing and analyzing each other’s errors, and then offering constructive criticism to each other to correct errors and overcome any shortcomings.” The unity-criticism-unity approach is meant to “strengthen each other and thus advance the group, unit or organization” towards its revolutionary objectives. This type of practice also means remaining open to forming larger strategic networks and fronts.

By labeling an insurgent collaboration “strategic,” we simply mean a relationship formed between two or more groups based on a purpose that is contingent on the short- or long-term goals of participant organizations, cells, or even between differing movements. Networks and fronts aligned by shared strategic objectives—if practiced in a principled manner—hold the potential for facilitating the creation of dynamic forms of insurgency that operate simultaneously on different scales, across multiple institutional sites, and amongst a broader formation of insurgent cells working towards their own unique political ends. We also urge differently situated groups, units, organizations, and movements to not only engage in these strategy-driven configurations and joint processes of reflection, but also to approach mass political education and the art of movement building in a way that maintains awareness of how we are all complicit (albeit to varying degrees) in the ritualized and programmatic violences that constitute American social and gendered racial formation. This is a principle developed over the last two decades by the national antiviolence organization INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.

Our publishing collective is itself aligned by a shared understanding of the U.S. regime of policing and imprisonment as a fundamentally anti-Black regime of physiological, psychic, and cultural violence that is traceable to the epoch of plantation slavery. We are quite deliberate in our efforts to maintain a political line that works critically and reflexively in collaboration with “above-” and “underground” organizations in the movement to abolish domestic warfare and the prison industrial complex. Our intention here is to support intellectual and cultural work that is directly connected to and relevant for the project of abolition. If, as abolitionists have argued for decades, the racial carceral-policing regime is not only a domestic military apparatus but a rigorous cultural production, then our enemy-in-struggle is also the mythologies, norms, and collective sense of “We” that has driven the last five-hundred-years of settler land-ecological conquest, racial chattel slavery, (proto)genocidal warfare, and empire. Prisoner Zine Distro

1. Sylvia Wynter, Slave Revolts as the First Form of Labor Struggle 2. Sylvia Wynter, We Know Where We Come From: Black Culture from Myall to Marely 3. , Excerpts from Black Skin White Mask 4. , Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle 5. 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance 6. Luana Ross, Excerpts from Inventing the Savage: Construction of Native America Criminality 7. Lorenzo & JoNina Ervin, et al. Building a Community-Based Anti-Fascist Movement 8. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 9. Angela Davis & Dylan Rodríguez, The Challenge of Abolition 10. Julia Chinyere Oparah, Celling Black Bodies: Black Women & the Global Prison Industrial Complex 11. Why Incarcerated Lives Matter to the Black Lives Matter Movement 12. Frank Wilderson, The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal and other writings 13. Liz Appel, White Supremacy in the Movement to Abolish the Prison Industrial Complex 14. Andrea Smith, Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing 15. Saidiya Hartman & Frank Wilderson, The Position of Unthought 16. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution 17. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, The Progressive Plantation: Racism Inside White Social Change Groups 18. Dylan Rodriguez, The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex 19. bell hooks, Excerpts from is for Everybody 20. Out of the Closet and Into the Libraries: A Collection of Radical Queer Moments 21. Eric Stanley & Nat Smith et al. Excerpts from Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex 22. George Ciccariello Maher, Every Crook Can Govern: Prison Strikes as a Window to the New World 23. Anthony Rayson, More Effective Prisoner Support 24. ABC Boston, Attacking Prisons at the Point of Production 25. Safir Chuma Asafo, Anatomy of a Snitch 26. How COINTELPRO Helped Destroy the Movements of the 1960s / The and its Annihilation by COINTELPRO 27. Intelligence Gathering, Dissemination, & Internet Security 28. Security Culture: a handbook for activists 29. Gay Shame, We Need Direct Action Divas (newspaper-style zine) 30. Black & Pink Newspaper (most current issue) 31. Solid Black Fist: Newsletter (most current issue) 32. Rust Belt Abolition Radio (Weekly Podcast, transcribed) (most current episode) 33. Abolition in Action: Bi-Monthly News from Critical Resistance (most current issue)

At the moment, we only have one member running our inside/outside distribution services, so if your order never is received please feel alright to politely nudge him from time to time. He does this work as a volunteer side-gig, unpaid, and at NO EXPENSE on your end, so your patience is appreciated in advance. Forward ever!

Bookshops carrying Propter Nos

Quimby’s Bookstore (Chicago) Women & Children First Bookstore (Chicago) Armadillo Books (Chicago) Blood Fruit Info shop (Chicago) Build Coffee (Chicago) Volumes Bookcafe (Chicago) 34 Trinity Arts & News (San Francisco)