(No one is required to agree with all or any of these in order to subscribe. This simply describes why we link the issues and topics that we do.)

• The United States is the politically dominant core in a global system that is on a catastrophic historical trajectory.
• That catastrophe has social and ecological dimensions that are held inside the same destructive dynamic.
• The global system is one system, with features that deny the independence of many classes of people — some based on economic status, some on gender, some on nationality or race… all features impacting on the very biosphere upon which life itself depends. These features are not separate systems. They are the interacting features of the same global system.
• That system must be replaced. That means that all these features must be considered and challenged simultaneously, without elevating one aspect of the system to the status of “the main issue.” What is the main issue is determined by specific circumstances, in specific times and places. There are many main issues, but never one main issue for all times and places.
• Allowing that system to decay and collapse spontaneously — without a significant and sustained challenge from within the United States — would result in a long, painful, and dangerously reactionary epoch in the United States itself. That is why we puy “American” in our name. We have unique needs and tasks here.

  Doing nothing constitutes an abandonment of our responsiblity to future generations. But doing “just anything” — without seriously considering consequences — can be just as irresponsible. We need “intelligence,” that is, information combined with analysis, on the system in order to understand it more thoroughly, if the actions we take are to have the desired effects.

• The organized challenges to that system from the social movements in the US are not currently outpacing the tempo of social and ecological disorder. In many cases, this is the result of one-size-fits-all formulas. We disagree with that method. Raising a child to live in a marsh requires teaching different skills than raising a child to live in the mountains.
• Past challenges to the system inside the United States — the belly of the beast — were important, but none have been successful in uprooting the power of men over women, the power of bosses over workers, the power of one ethnicity or nationality over another, or the continuing attack on the environment by cancerous industrialism.
• The basis of the failure to mobilize systemic resistance inside the United States has been dependency. Community self-determination requires independence.

  The components of community self-determination are self-sufficiency and self-defense.

  Any genuine attempt to develop independence must begin with the erasure of the deepest of all social dependencies — that of women. All self determination begins with the self determination of women. This implies an absolute priority to support and promote self-sufficiency and self-defense for women.

• Grand cookie-cutter strategies do not work. The larger an organization or project is, the less its agility, and the greater the portion of resources and energy required to administer and manage, instead of do the work. Management easily becomes an energy sink.

  With increasing scale, the management tail will always begin to wag the action dog. Moreover, the complexity of emergent reality in every case undermines predictions. Small, agile organizations have greater tactical flexibility to repsond to the unexpected. Limiting the scale of organizations is necessary to preserve their tactical agility. Tactical agility is based directly on local knowledge and experience.

• Strategic guidelines are needed that apply generally throughout the United States; but the pursuit of activities that follow those guidelines must be decentralized and associated through “networks.” These need not be involved in any illegal actions. In the event that self-defense itself is declared illegal as a feature of a reactionary period in the future, we maintain that self-defense is inalienable as a right. But focusing on this aspect alone is a habit of thought that is associated with withdrawal survivalism, a tendency steeped in violent male fantasies that we reject.
• Those strategic guidelines must be developed in practice, but some of the basic ones must be: personal debt relief, re-localization and food-water-energy-health-and-learning self-sufficiency for local communities as the precondition for wider political resistance. The stopgap politics of elections and policy struggles largely remain a trap, but that trap cannot be avoided as long as every other dimension of our lives is still completely dependent on the system of which electoral-policy politics is the only practical expression. Independence is not a state of mind, but an identifiable material condition. We do not advocate, however, summary withdrawal from policy and electoral activism. Until we have established independence, we must continue to tactically employ policy and electoral struggles as part of the larger strategic vision, especially supporting the development of local popular political power.
• Re-localization and community self-determination/self-defense are not seen by Insurgent American as withdrawal and survival strategies, but as the necessary first developmental phase of political strategy in for the establishment of independent long-term oases for both resistance to the old order and laboratories for a new one. Resistance can be effective without the necessity for offensive violence. But a new society, as Ivan Illich observed, cannot be based on the liberal vision of exchanging “the production of guns for the produciton of grain.” It is the way in which we produce that has to be changed, and figuring out how to change that requires thousands of different local networks engaging in trial and error, and sharing experience.
• Deep political challenges require deep challenges to ideology. Networks also needed to share information, news, reflections, culture, and analysis.
• Insurgent American aims to be a practical strategic resource for the development of “insurgent” networks in the United States.