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How to Read This Manual

Sections for Everyone

Two sections are recommended for all readers.

The first, Core Skills, covers security culture, personal security, covert communication, digital hygiene, countersurveillance, first aid, disaster prep, and a know-your-rights primer — plus links to basic survival resources. It comes first because survival is the foundation of any political effort.

The second, Affinity Group & First Operation, walks you through forming a small circle of trusted people, meeting securely, setting action goals, and running your first operation. By the end, your group will have acted together and developed a shared sense of what role you want to play in a larger movement.

From there, you can specialize based on your interests. The six optional sections are organized along two axes:

1. Aboveground vs. Underground
   • Aboveground — operations are open: your identity is known or discoverable, and you accept the legal and social risks
   • Underground — operations are covert: concealment and deniability are paramount
2. Operation type
   • Decisive — directly accomplishes a goal: seizing resources, sabotaging infrastructure, blocking or halting an action
   • Shaping — builds the political, social, and informational conditions for victory: intelligence, propaganda, education, and alternative institutions
   • Sustaining — keeps the movement alive and functional: recruiting, financing, legal support, safehouses, and logistics

Operation Types

Aboveground Decisive Operations

Aboveground decisive operations entail direct action that accomplishes goals without concealment — your identity will likely be discovered. Covers two tracks:

• Building alternatives — parallel institutions for food, housing, education, health, economy, energy, and community safety
• Obstruction and occupation — blockades, sit-ins, building occupations, flotillas, train blocking, eviction defense

Aboveground Shaping Operations

Aboveground shaping operations are public actions that shape the conditions for victory.

• Civil disobedience — tactics, legal risk, and strategic timing
• Economic disruption — boycotts, strikes, divestment
• Culture and art — protest art, subversive culture, documentation
• Influence and narrative — media manipulation, electoralism, opposition research
• Political education — curriculum and rebel history, lessons from past movements

Aboveground Sustaining Operations

Aboveground sustaining operations are non-clandestine operations that keep the movement alive.

• Legal and prisoner support — jail support, court support, prison survival, conspiracy charges, grand jury investigations
• Activist legal knowledge — de-arrest techniques, lawyer-protester coordination
• Street medicine — field medical care for protests, actions, and community health

Underground Decisive Operations

Underground decisive operations are covert direct action carried out by individuals or clandestine networks. Covers advanced tradecraft, sabotage, and complex operation design — plus, with important caveats, violence against humans. Violence is generally counterproductive, but resistance members should understand combat, survival, and evasion as a defensive matter.

• Tradecraft — disguise, escape and evasion, secure operational comms
• Sabotage and seizure — covert entry, resource expropriation, physical sabotage, hacking
• Operation design — target selection, multi-phase planning
• Combat and survival — hand-to-hand, firearms, assassination, evasion

Underground Shaping Operations

Underground shaping operations are covert operations that shape the political landscape without direct confrontation.

• Intelligence — surveillance, counterintelligence, infiltration, OSINT, cell structure, running sources
• Shadow governance — building replacement decision-making structures, policy, and democratic councils
• Cyber and info ops — extreme privacy, disappearing from databases, cyber resistance
• Covert propaganda — graffiti, banner hangs, morale operations that build spirit and undermine authority

Underground Sustaining Operations

Underground sustaining operations are everything that keeps the underground functional.

• Financing — fundraising and funding clandestine work
• Personnel — recruiting and vetting new members
• Infrastructure — safehouses, covert travel, border crossing, supply chains and logistics
• Rescue and evasion — extracting comrades from custody or danger, going off-grid, evading capture

About This Manual

The Goal of This Manual

This manual has two goals.

The first is destruction — of the fossil fuel industry that will kill billions via global heat death; of capitalism, which incentivizes the minimization of the costs of paying humans fair wages and harvesting natural resources, and the maximization of the prices for what people need to survive; and of the rising authoritarianism in the United States and abroad.

The second, and more important, is construction — of a world where everyone has their basic needs met, where the goal of an economy is to fulfill those needs within the bounds of what nature can provide, and where every person is free to live without arbitrary authority to command them.

Why This Manual Is Needed

This manual exists because we are living through a moment where two immense and dangerous forces — climate collapse and rising fascism — are converging. These crises are not separate; they feed off each other and intensify the risks we face. Inaction will lead to mass displacement, suffering, and death on an unimaginable scale. We are not facing a distant threat. We are already in the early stages of this collapse.

Neoliberal systems have utterly failed to protect people or the planet. These systems prioritize profit and control over life and sustainability. As a result, the current political and economic order no longer functions in the interest of the people — it has become a threat to them.

From this reality, two truths emerge:

1. The systems we live under — hierarchical, exploitative, and detached from nature — have failed and cannot be trusted to solve the crises they created.
2. In order to survive and build a livable future, we must take bold, radical action — often outside of, or in defiance of, those systems.

In times of disaster — whether brief or prolonged — the default response from those in power is often authoritarianism: increased policing, militarization, scapegoating, and violence. We have already seen how quickly right-wing extremists can mobilize in moments of chaos.

However, the opposite is true for the general public. In times of crisis we share, we support, we help one another.

However, without an organized resistance and a clear alternative to harness the innate cooperative nature of people, the vacuum left by collapsing systems will be filled by fascism, eco-fascism, or a libertarian nightmare where those with structural power and violence on their side dominate.

This manual is written to help prevent that future.

It is here to prepare us — for the short-term emergencies caused by climate disasters and for the long-term breakdown of systems we once thought stable. It aims to give people the knowledge and tools to survive, resist, and rebuild. It offers practical skills for direct action, mutual aid, community defense, and the creation of new, decentralized systems that prioritize consent, cooperation, and equity.

This manual provides structured guidance on survival, security, organization, resistance, and the creation of alternative systems, from core personal skills to collective action and long-term social transformation.

We are not powerless. There is no single way forward, but there are many roles to play in shaping what comes next. Whether in resistance, care, logistics, or rebuilding, everyone has a place in this work. This manual exists to help you find yours.

Conclusion

Once the core skills and affinity group sections are complete, the remaining sections are action-oriented references. Jump around by chapter based on what's useful — but if your affinity group is gravitating toward a particular track, read it fully and end with a higher-level action of that kind. This is a long road. The goal is always to fight another day. Welcome to the rebellion.