July 31, 2013
I am one of the many prisoners who depends on the generous donations given to the PRLF. Without those donations I wouldn’t have been able to receive this copy of BAsics which I hold in one hand as I write this letter. I want to thank all PRLF volunteers and all the donors who have contributed to the campaign to get 2,000 copies of BAsics inside of prisons.
I also want to urge everybody out there to get their hands on this book and to help get it into the hands of others, not just prisoners, but into the hands of youth who are in danger of becoming prisoners themselves. There are kids out there who actually know that life in prison could be part of their foreseeable future. I know because I was one of those kids. Get this book into their hands now before they end up in a cell next to mine for hurting someone in their own community. Direct them to BAsics 3:16, show them there’s another way and bring them forward. Help them unlock their potential and give them a sense of purpose that doesn’t involve killing each other. Give them an alternative to the criminal lifestyle that doesn’t involve conforming to this horrid system. That is what they need, that is what they ache for. They want to rebel, they just have to be introduced to the correct way to do so. Put them on the path to becoming communists...–
Prisoner in California
[Note from PRLF: Basics 3:16 is “An Appeal to Those the System Has Cast Off”: Here I am speaking not only to prisoners but to those whose life is lived on the desperate edge, whether or not they find some work; to those without work or even homes; to all those the system and its enforcers treat as so much human waste material.
Raise your sights above the degradation and madness, the muck and demoralization, above the individual battle to survive and to ‘be somebody’ on the terms of the imperialists – of fouler, more monstrous criminals than mythology has ever invented or jails ever held. Become a part of the human saviors of humanity: the gravediggers of this system and the bearers of the future communist society.
This is not just talk or an attempt to make poetry here: there are great tasks to be fulfilled, great struggles to be carried out, and yes great sacrifices to be made to accomplish all this. But there is a world to save – and to win – and in that process those the system has counted as nothing can count for a great deal. They represent a great reserve force that must become an active force for the proletarian revolution.]