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 antiracist, anticapitalist, and antipatriarchal 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 antipatriotic 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 (soon to be 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.
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 Queer 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 Black Liberation Army’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.
For a print copies of PROPTER NOS, please send a request by snail-mail. We try to respond to mail as quickly as possible, but during our editing cycles and around certain deadlines our replies might be slightly delayed. We thank you for your patience in advance and hope to continue facilitate the dissemination of sharp criticism and analysis for the road ahead. To download PN in digital format please follow the link on our site.
Download, print, share and circulate our statement in PDF form HERE
*A version of this communiqué will appear in Issue #28 of The Abolitionist.
