ULK 80: MIM(Prisons) Update

At the end of 2022 we conducted a more in depth end of year review than the last few years, received reports from a number of allied organizations, and held a live group discussion of these reports. This work signaled an increase in our collaboration and communication to develop our support base on the outside. While the reports themselves will not be public, we reported on many of our accomplishments and some setbacks during 2022 in our last issue.

This year we will do a better job of laying out the tasks to achieve the goals we set for ourselves, setting deadlines for those tasks to get done and assigning people to complete those tasks. While we made good progress on most of the goals we set last year, we had set a goal of returning to 6 issues of ULK per year without setting any real plan to achieve that goal. As it turned out some of the setbacks we faced ensured that we did not make any progress towards that goal, so we have removed any timeline from that particular goal until we can build up the forces to support its achievement. We will remain at 4 issues per year for the foreseeable future.

On that note we did make progress in diversifying roles on projects like ULK, the intro study program, and general handling of prisoner mail. We will be focusing on developing this diversification more in 2023, as we work towards our goal of having more locality-based chapters of AIPS to support comrades organizing inside.

This year North Texas AIPS will be working with jailhouse lawyers to update the Texas Pack. Once that is done, probably late 2023, we will release an updated price. If you want to be a part of the committee updating it please let us know ASAP. The current 2020 version is available for seven postage stamps. We get so many requests for legal resources from Texas, we do require that you pay for them.

2022 Financial Report

One piece of our annual report we did promise last issue that we did not have yet was our financial report. In terms of our contributions from prisoners, the chart below shows that donations have been growing over the last 3 years.

Our budget for 2023 is projected to be almost double the budget for 2021. This is primarily due to an increase in costs for bulk mailing of ULKs due to a loss in labor support, secondarily to a general increase in subscribers and associated mail over the last 2 years, and thirdly to a general increase in prices.

We are in good shape to meet our financial needs in 2023 with an expected increase in contributions from AIPS comrades. If we do not see such an increase it will be tight and we will not be able to expand our programs at the rate we would like.

The Broader Movement

In this issue we have a couple articles that address some efforts by others to organize around Maoism. We hope these brief commentaries can serve to help us consolidate more forces around the MIM pole of the movement. We may release more in depth papers later in the year.

We look forward to the coming year with optimism, as we see many opportunities for growth and development of our movement.