Recent Letters from Prisoners to REVOLUTION

November 21, 2022

Editors’ note: We at revcom.us periodically publish letters we receive from prisoners on revolutionary theory and struggle, as well as other aspects of human experience and thought, including conditions and struggle within the prisons themselves. These include letters from people influenced by political trends that are different from the new communism brought forward by Bob Avakian. We appreciate and learn from all correspondence from the prisons. The opinions in the letters we publish are those of the writers and not necessarily those of revcom.us. The following are two recent letters from prisoners.

“Where do we start?”

From a prisoner in Texas:

Greetings, this is to let you know that I have received “The New Communism.”¹ Actually, you accidentally sent two copies, but I’ll make great use of the extra one.

I have a further inquiry though. In BAsics² 5.9, BA [Bob Avakian] speaks to winning people to being communists prior to recruiting them. Of course, this is a correct method and viewpoint. However, my inquiry is how do you suppose this to be done in the best manner possible? What I mean is what/where do we start? What concepts, strategies, etc., do we introduce to the lay person first?

Epistemology? Organizational methods? Tactical campaigns? In my short time at this work, I’ve been using the method of utilizing tactical campaigns as a springboard, but I’m not sure this has been quite as effective as I would like. I would like to go the epistemology route, but I haven’t encountered anyone yet with the patience to sit and learn the essentials of epistemology. Maybe my methods are not up to par. So anyways I would like your POV on this.

Also I’ve started to get the REVOLUTION papers on time and w/o delay lately. My address will be changing pretty soon, as I await release from solitary confinement.

XXXXXXXX

At your convenience can you send me “The Science of Evolution” by Ardea Skybreak.³

****

“Prison reform” and “human rights” under the truncated, fake, hypocrite bourgeois democracy we all live under are mere illusions and myths,...

From a prisoner in Texas:

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

—Steve Biko, South African anti-apartheid, Black Consciousness Movement leader, murdered by police 1977

Dear XXXX, PRLF⁴ and comrades in struggle:

Fraternal, revolutionary greetings from the “belly of the beast” of the Babylon plantation empire of genocidal mass incarceration, and "from a prison within a prison,” [control unit solitary torture chambers], I send my rage and revolutionary love against the raging capitalist machine, hoping all are well on that end, as is with me, despite the brutality of the heart, mind and soul by the evil forces of capitalist captivity and naked prison fascism, living in a different world, this side of the prison walls, and caged in Amerikkka’s gulag death kkkamps, of what is the “norm” in these prisonhouses, more repressive in the capitalist prisons of the deep dixie south, as is happening in prisons in Alabama, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana….

Thank you for your letter and the copy of the updates on the Alabama freedom movement going on in that prison system, on the horrific and barbaric conditions of captivity and the racist, inhumanities going on there—a systematic pattern and practice of all of these racist, oppressive prisonhouses in Dixie Landia, the real fascist juggernaut of the Amerikkka plantation slavery empire of genocidal mass incarceration.⁵ Back in the day, when a contingent of us “prison abolitionists and revolutionists,” were engaged in struggle against the prisondom here in Texas, as relates the prison conditions case styled Ruiz v. Estelle, 503 f. supp. 1265 (S.D. Tex. Hou. div. 1980), we were fighting in the trenches, in the courtrooms, in the cellblocks and everywhere we were being oppressed and exploited by the massive forced slavery empire of the Texas Prison System, and its slave prison factories, the Texas corrections industry, a conglomerate of prison factories and industries that produced "goods" for the state agencies without compensation to the prison slaves. The 13th Amendment’s legal foundations stem from its enactment when chattel slavery of Blacks was abolished in 1865 and began prison slavery for commission of convictions for crime. In Texas, these neo-colonial criminal structures remain in place, for Texas Prisons rest on a foundation of Yankee colonialist war crimes, annexation of stolen lands, and the building of the Texas colonial economy via, “lease a convict” schemes, that used adult and juvenile prisoners to build the Texas colonial economy, and its “infrastructure” in the building of the state buildings and mansions today still occupied by those bourgeoisie elected politicians and parasitic, capitalist prostitutes that control these racist, barbaric "penal institutions" sustained by the sheer racist state violence and brutality of its captive populations. Here, recently, while preparing the land for the construction of a new school near the old central prison unit in Sugarland, Texas, construction crews unearthed a mass grave where 95 prison slaves had been buried, all having the same trauma blows to their skulls, like hit on the head with a pipe, or blunt instrument, by someone on horseback or prison guard overseers armed with weapons who would maim, or kill prison slaves if they refused to work in the cotton fields. See www.houstonpublicmedia.com; see also, Texas Prisons: The Walls Came Tumbling Down, by Martin & Olsen, Tex. Monthly Press, 1983.

Yes, in the Ruiz litigation, because of the systemic widespread abuses of prisoners’ rights by the prisoncrats, the U.S. Department of Justice intervened on our behalf of the entire Texas prisoner class, as "plaintiff-intervenor," all through the trial and into post judgment proceedings, where the state of Texas all along fought tooth and nail, claiming their prisons were constitutional, supported by establishment politicians such as U.S. Congressman John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who as Texas Attorney General, and Texas Solicitor General, defended the prison system and lied, filed fraudulent pleadings, called false, perjurious state witnesses, which did not help them as U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice (RIP), issued scathing remedial court orders to correct these conditions and abuses, to include holding the prison in contempt of court and fining the state millions of dollars, for its contemptuous conduct. I was in the middle of all these struggles. See Hernandez v. Estelle, 788 f. 2d 1115 (5th Cir. 1978). conditions have returned, pre-Ruiz, being ignored!

In other words, “prison reform” and “human rights” under the truncated, fake, hypocrite bourgeois democracy we all live under are mere illusions and myths, for the true nature of the capitalist political economy is criminal to begin with as it robs the working class of its labor power and labor value, exploits it, and creates a surplus profit-system as the slave owners invest more monies to buy more chains, and their auxiliary means of production and distribution while at the same time in control of government—democrat or republican are the same pig—and enacts laws to protect its own interests of class inheritance and their omnipotent sacredness of private property, and keeping the wheels of institutional racism, inequality and the exploitation of labor by the one percent (1%) of those who own and control the means of production. The capitalist system, like the prisons, under capitalism will never “reform” themselves. They cry about “civil rights,” but those mean nothing to them. The utter hypocrisy is proof in the pudding of what is going on right this very moment in the war against Ukraine by Russia, NATO and their oligarchical machinery. Prisons, like the military industrial complex, are big business, and the system will never reform itself to protect social and human dignity, as their main interest is finance capital, finance accumulation of capital, controlling world capitalist markets, and fight for world domination of its imperialist spheres of control and domination. We, the oppressed, must wake up and realize this before it is too late, and work to create revolutionary consciousness and movement and fight to dismantle this current system and outs these mad, insane sociopaths, and psychotic fascists and create political power in workers’ collectives, where the working class will own and manage the means of wealth, and production and distribution, and an eco-socialist and equalitarian system where human needs and as well human rights reign supreme over capitalist super-profits.