Publishers for Palestine: Statement of Solidarity

A statement from Publishers for Palestine calling for a ceasefire and denouncing repression of Palestinian solidarity.

Drafted November 3, 2023

We invite publishers, editors, and writers around the world who stand for justice, freedom of expression, and the power of the written word, to sign this letter and join our global solidarity collective, Publishers for Palestine.

We honour the courage, creativity, and resistance of Palestinians, their profound love of their historic lands, and their refusal to be erased, or grow silent, despite Israel’s horrific genocidal acts of violence. Against the chilling complicity of Western media and cultural industries, we find hope sparked by the surge of bodies and voices that continue to gather, write, speak, sing, combat falsehoods, and build community and solidarity across social media and on our streets, across the world.

Over the past month, we have witnessed Israel’s incessant bombardment of Gaza as a form of collective punishment, using banned phosphorous bombs and unusual new weapons, with the support of governments in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Europe, and Australia. We have watched 1.1 million Palestinians flee their homes in the north, only to experience the brutal destruction of hospitals and spaces of shelter in schools, refugee camps, churches, and mosques in the south of Gaza. We are currently witnessing 2.3 million people, of whom 50% are children, being cruelly denied basic necessities of shelter, food, water, fuel, and electricity as Israel launches a ground invasion. Over 9,000 Palestinians have been killed thus far, along with entire generations of families that fled to Gaza during the Nakba of 1948. And with unbearable grief, we have watched Israel’s horrific killing of over 3,500 children. As Raz Segal, a Jewish scholar of Holocaust and genocide states: “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed.”

Israel and Western powers are making a concerted attempt to extinguish dissent and maintain their faltering control. Across the publishing and media landscape since October 7th, 2023, the reprisals for speaking out have already been severe and extensive. We decry the killing of dozens of journalists in Gaza, including Mohamed Fayez Abu Matar, Saeed al-Taweel, Mohammed Sobh, Hisham Alnwajha, Mohammad Al-Salhi, Mohammad Jarghoun, Ahmed Shehab, Husam Mubarak, Mohammad Balousha, Issam Bhar, Salam Mema, Assaad Shamlakh, Ibrahim Mohammad Lafi, Khalil Abu Aathra, Sameeh Al-Nady, Abdulhadi Habib, Yousef Maher Dawas, and Roshdi Sarraj.

As cultural workers who pay careful attention to words and language, we note that this genocide was inaugurated with Israeli occupation military leaders using words such as “human animal” to justify their attacks on the civilians of Gaza. It is shocking to observe the use of such dehumanizing language from a people who have themselves experienced the same in the context of genocide. We are also reminded of the language of erasure and genocide embedded in the Zionist (and Christian) mythology of “A land without a people for a people without a land,” enacted by colonial Britain’s Balfour Declaration 106 years ago on November 2, 1917.  

These histories of white supremacist, colonial, and capitalist systems of erasure, extraction, and control are reflected in the current moment, even within the rarefied worlds of arts and culture. From the Frankfurt Book Fair/Litprom’s refusal to honour the award given to Palestinian author Adania Shibli (a letter of protest against this was signed by over 1,000 well-known writers), to the cancellation of author readings such Viet Thanh Nguyen at New York’s 92Y, and Mohammed el-Kurd at the University of Vermont, and therecent firing of David Velasco, the editor of Artforum magazine, Western literary and publishing organizations have revealed their deep imbrication in U.S. and Israeli political and economic interests by silencing and punishing writers who speak out for Palestine.  

We condemn the complicity of all those working within corporate and independent publishing who enable or condone such repression through their cowardice, silence, and cooperation with the demands of Israeli occupation and imperialist donors, funders, and governments. We condemn the policing and censorship of writers, the bullying and harassment of bookstore owners and staff, and the intimidation of publishing workers who are in solidarity with Palestinians. Publishing, for us, is the exercise of freedom, cultural expression, and resistance. As publishers we are dedicated to creating spaces for creative and critical Palestinian voices and for all who stand in solidarity against imperialism, Zionism, and settler-colonialism. We defend our right to publish, edit, distribute, share, and debate works that call for Palestinian liberation without recrimination. We know that this is our role in the resistance.

The silencing of Palestinian authors and writers only reinforces a fear of Palestinian literary resistance and contributes to the genocide of Palestinians and land theft. The same fear that is behind the bombs, the demolitions, the abductions, and the torture of Palestinian prisoners, is the fear that holds the Palestinian archives in Israeli control. As the writer Ghassan Kanafani said, “the Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary.” He reminds us that none of us are free until all of us are free. 

Now is the time to stand with Palestinians and step into a new era of anti-colonial resistance– an era that refuses the Oslo concessions and the normalization of ties with the Zionist state. Now is the time to remember and uphold other historical victories against settler-colonial regimes, such as the resistance that rid Algeria of its French colonizers. Now is the time to intensify our support for Palestinian liberation from Israel and its U.S. and European backers. Now is the time to build solidarity amongst us to collectively refuse intimidation, repression, fear, and violence. 

We call on our comrades, friends, and colleagues across various publishing industries to sign this letter and support the following demands:  

• Stop the genocide and bring an end to all violence against Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, across historic Palestine, and in the diaspora.

• Hold Israel and its allies accountable for the war crimes they have committed. 

• Assert the demands of Palestinian people to freedom, resistance, and return.

• Uphold the call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid. 

• Assure that Palestinian voices should not be silenced from future international book fairs and literary festivals across the world. Instead, they should be invited as guests of honour to share their stories.

• Commit to making the publishing industry a genuine site of learning and freedom of speech. As publishers we are dedicated to creating spaces for Palestinian voices and those who stand in solidarity against the war machine.

(If you work in the publishing industry and would like to add your name to this statement, please fill out this form.)

Signed: 

ArabLit Quarterly and ArabLit Books, Morocco

ARP Books, Canada

Arsenal Pulp Press, Canada

Between the Lines, Canada

Beyond the Pale Books, Ireland

Charles H. Kerr Publishing, US

Common Notions Press, US

Daraja Press, Canada

Écosociété, Québec, Canada & France

En Toutes Lettres, Morocco

Fernwood Publishing, Canada

Hajar Press, UK

Haymarket Books, US & UK

Interlink Publishing, US

Interventions, Australia

Invisible Publishing, Canada

Left Book Club, UK

LeftWord Books, India

Lux Éditeur, Québec & France

Manifest Llibres, Catalunya, Spain

Marjin Kiri, Indonesia

Mémoire d’encrier, Québec, Canada 

Pasado y Presente, Catalunya, Spain

Pluto Press, UK & US

Pluto Journals, Ltd., UK

PM Press, US & UK

Radical Books Collective, US

Roam Agency, US

Saqi Books, UK

Setu Prakashani, India

Stree Samya, India

Tilted Axis, UK

trace press, Canada

Upping the Anti, Canada

Verso Books, US and UK

Verso Libros, Catalunya, Spain

Women Unlimited, India

Essay Press, US

Microcosm Publishing, US

Ketebe Publishing, Turkey

Out-Spoken Press, UK

dpr-barcelona, Catalunya, Spain

Seven Stories Press, US

The Hobbyhorse, US

AK Press, US & UK

Zand Press, Nairobi

Canadian Dimension, Canada

Shed publishing, France

Monthly Review, US

Communis Press, US

Tajfuny, Poland

Small Beer Press, US

Uitgeverij EPO, Belgium

Sin Permiso, Spain

CounterPunch, US

Sambasivan & Parikh, US

Pinhole Poetry, Canada

Assembly Press, Canada

Penerbit Anagram, Indonesia

Tanah Air Beta, Indonesia

POST Press, Indonesia

Bamboe Roentjing, Indonesia

Intensif Books, Indonesia

Basanti Press, India

Labirin Buku, Indonesia

Pustaka Bahamut, Indonesia

Svara, Malaysia

Puan Catra, Indonesia

Buku Fixi, Malaysia

Rotasi Books, Indonesia

Penerbit Buruan & Co., Indonesia

Yayasan Bentala, Indonesia

Penerbit Terang, Indonesia

Enggang Media Publisher, Indonesia

Ilhambookstore, Indonesia

Renard Press, UK

Entypois Publications , Greece

Zuka Books, Pakistan

Dalam dekapan cinta dan pembebasan, Indonesia

Fernwood Press, US

Three Essays Collective, India

Mascara Publishing, Australia

Cipher Press, UK

Antinomi, Indonesia

Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania

Peninsula Press, UK

Edisi Mori, Indonesia

Editora Terra sem Amos, Brazil

Taipa Editorial, Brazil

Surrey Muse Arts Society, Canada

Grieveland, US

Bookmarks , UK

Anarasa, Indonesia

Vita Books, Kenya

BULANDU Publisher, Indonesia

Open Protest Network, UK

Arc Poetry Magazine, Canada

Sigikata, Indonesia

Penerbit Cerita Kata, Indonesia

Black Goddexx press, US

Pro You media , Indonesia

404 Ink, UK

Panitia Jumaahan, Indonesia

ContraEscritura, Spain

Rachna Books & Publications, India

Založba /*cf., Slovenia

Kedai Hitam Putih, Malaysia

Litani Literasi, Indonesia

The 87 Press, UK

IS Editora, Brazil

Cassava Republic Press, Nigeria & UK

Editora Faísca , Brazil

HOMEF books, Nigeria

Fahamu Africa, Senegal

Katarsis, Indonesia

Perpustakaan Online Genosida 1965-1966, Indonesia

Penerbit Partikular, Indonesia

Blaft Publications, India

Dahlia Books, UK

Pustakapedia, Indonesia

Turos Pustaka, Indonesia

Footnote Press, Indonesia

Divan Kitap, Turkey

Babil Kitap, Turkey

BPPM Balairung UGM, Indonesia

OWN IT!, UK

Les Pages Noires, Canada

Carnation Zine, Canada

Spectre Journal, US

Saffron Press, Canada

Penerbit Pelangi Sastra, Indonesia

Penerbit Shofia, Indonesia

Gantala Press, Philippines

Litwin Books, US

El Viejo Topo, Spain

Edicions del 1979, Catalunya

Icaria Editorial, Spain

Menino Morreu, Coruña, Galiza

Anti-Racism Daily, US

Skein Press, Ireland

Statement in solidarity with Palestine

Common Notions Press stands in solidarity with Palestine and calls for an end to Israel’s hundred years’ war on the Palestinian people, and the unfolding genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign which has killed nearly 5,100, nearly half of whom are children, wounded over 15,000 more, and displaced at least one million Palestinians in just the past three weeks. We also call for an end to the blockade on Gaza and an end to 75 years of Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The US government already sends $3.8 billion to Israel annually to fund: the continued systemic occupation, mass eviction, incarceration, torture and senseless killing of Palestinians at funerals, hospitals, peaceful demonstrations, and cultural celebrations, and the daily deprivation of rights and freedom. Now the US is pledging to send billions more to help Israel to realize its goal of complete annihilation of Palestine. It is our duty to resist two settler states that profit from racial colonial capitalism and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples from Turtle Island to Palestine. We must say: not in our name. We stand unwaveringly and unconditionally with the people of Palestine in their fight for life and liberation and support oppressed people everywhere in their anticolonial struggles.

In this moment of collective heartbreak, devastation, and despair, we encourage our comrades to amplify the stories of Palestinians in Gaza, share resources, heed calls to action from Palestinian activists, defend each other from repression by the powerful for standing in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle, engage in collective study as well as comradely self-reflection and conversations in community, and organize everywhere to stop the genocide we are witnessing in realtime.

From the river to the sea, #FreePalestine!

In solidarity,

The Common Notions Collective

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List of citations/resources:

• A Textbook Case of Genocide

• Decolonize Palestine

• Letters From Gaza

• Dispatch from the Palestinian Youth Movement

• What can US Jews do right now? From JVP

Reflections of an Uprising: On Loss, Healing, and the Inevitability of Struggle

It’s been three years since the brutal police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the summer of uprisings that it sparked. What have we learned? What is our work? Where do we go from here? In this June 2023 Common Notions Blog post, author Geo Maher and writers and editors David Luis Glisch-Sánchez and Nic Rodriguez-Villafañe reflect on these and other questions.

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Every Spiral Has a Downturn

Geo Maher

Three years can seem an eternity, but in the fitful temporality of our present—warmed to a fever by struggle and Covid alike—they seem to have passed in a flash. Lenin’s adage about those weeks when decades happen, when the collective pace quickens to the point where baby steps suddenly become his famous “leaps, leaps, leaps,” was never so true and never so widely cited. But if we often tend to see accelerated change as working our favor, not so of these years, which have been marked by downturn, disarray, and even despair.

To say that much has changed in the three years since mass rebellion shook the country and the world, in other words, is to speak of a profound loss. Lost is the heady confidence so many young people displayed in the streets of Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Lost is the leverage, however fleeting, that movement demands to defund and even abolish the police once seemed to enjoy among political elites. Lost too, as our forces scatter, is the conceptual clarity with which many confronted mid- 2020, as the predictable talking-points of the right are taken up by even some self-described leftists, the defeatism of any downturn dovetailing with attacks on abolition disguised as pragmatism.

To be clear, even loss is too passive a framing, so here’s a better one: counterinsurgency. The entire weight of the political and media apparatus has been brought to bear on our movements in an attempt to convince us that we were wrong, too ambitious in our demands; that defunding is a pipe dream and abolition would be a veritable nightmare. The talking points of the Fraternal Order of Police—that the uptick in violence we are seeing in Philadelphia and elsewhere is the product of a defunding that never happened—are being parroted uncritically across the political spectrum.

Much has changed in the past three years, most of it for the worse. But lest we see this loss as a caution against Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s imperative to “change everything”—not all change is good, after all—we should be clear that even this kernel of truth is wrapped in a far greater falsehood. Specifically, we could make three dialectical propositions about where we find ourselves today, one for each year that has passed since the rebellion.

1. Things have gotten worse. The narrative of the right has found traction amid a deteriorating economic situation for most and a very real uptick in community violence in many parts of the country—all of which demands a coherent, counter-hegemonic abolitionist response. Concretely, this has made our work much harder and has contributed to a widespread sense of despair.

2. But they aren’t as bad as we’re being told. Counterinsurgency exists for a reason, and it’s to convince us that we’ve lost. The breath and ink expended to discredit defunding and abolition is only necessary because of the real alternative our movements represent. If Amílcar Cabral famously insisted that we claim no easy victories, we should accept no premature defeats, either.

3. Better and worse aren’t opposites. Much less are they mutually exclusive. As the dialectical tradition teaches, oppositions are dynamic clashes between social forces—and visions—vying for hegemony. On the one hand, to be worse means staying the same: the same white supremacy, the same police violence, the same—indeed, steadily worse—economic realities for the poorest and most vulnerable. And as the economic situation gets worse, the system doubles down and seeks comfort in the racist same. But getting worse can also be a doorway toward getting better, as the catastrophic human wreckage of the present accumulates in new struggles for justice.

Every spiral has a downturn, but descends with a sort of gravity that continues to gather force—in the form of consciousness, education, and the coherence of our analysis and the political formations that impress it upon the world. To recognize this entails neither the classic left accelerationism that insists “things must get worse to get better,” nor a heroic determinism of inevitable victories. It could scarcely be said that a moral universe even exists, much less that its arc bends toward something so ephemeral as justice. The only thing that is guaranteed is that the oppressed will continue to fight. Struggle is inevitable, victory is not.

***

Geo Maher (George Ciccariello-Maher) is the Coordinator of Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction and the author of A World Without Police, Decolonizing Dialectics, Building the Commune, and We Created Chavez. His latest book, Spirals of Revolt: Study and Struggle to Abolish the Present is out next year through Common Notions.

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Black Liberation and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice

David Luis Glisch-Sánchez and Nic Rodriguez-Villafañe

We had the idea for what is now Sana Sana: Latinx Pain & Radical Visions for Healing and Justice, years before the 2020 uprisings, but it was not until the collective energy that was mobilized nationally and globally around the simple yet radical premise that Black Lives Matter that we embarked in earnest to birth Sana Sana into this world.

We were clear from the very beginning that we did not wish to make the same mistakes that many Latinx projects do, and that is to explicitly or implicitly suggest that Blackness and Latinidad are mutually exclusive. For us, the Movement for Black Lives is a Latinx struggle because Afro-Latinx people exist, have always existed, and that Latinx freedom—whether Afro-descended or not—cannot be realized before, or separate from, Black Liberation.

Justice, freedom, and liberation, for us, is an all-or-nothing proposition. It is in this spirit and deeply felt commitment that Sana Sana was shaped and grown. The anthology, in the writing of both contributors and ourselves as editors, make plain that as Latinxs we must emphatically reject the aspirational whiteness that white supremacy entices us with and that has plagued our people for centuries. To show up for and actively practice the belief that Black Lives Matter requires an equal—if not greater—effort to confront, resist, and abolish whiteness as a political project. More specifically we acknowledged that a central premise of our liberation work is to usher and curate spaces that center healing.

White supremacy creates systems of oppression that are intentionally built to cause us pain. We see Sana Sana as a creative interruption of that harm, where speaking openly about pain, activating our healing, and imagining new worlds is a liberation, life giving project. It was our intention, and is our hope, that Sana Sana be received and understood as a project that is not just in conversation with the Movement for Black Lives, but in so many ways, an extension of it.

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David Luis Glisch-Sánchez is a queer feminist antiracist healer, and is the founder of Soul Support Life Coaching, an individual and organizational coaching practice rooted in the queer Black and Latinx feminist tradition. They are also an interdisciplinary sociologist working in the areas of emotion, race, genders, and sexualities. They currently teach in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).

Nic Rodriguez-Villafañe is a non-binary transmasculine Boricua poet, writer, and DJ. They are currently an adjunct professor of American Studies and Writing Arts at Jefferson University in Philadelphia. They have been an organizer for over 15 years and are a researcher with the Philadelphia Participatory Research Collective (PPRC). Their poems have been described as an "eclectic blend of spanglish hip hop rhythms and Puerto Rican jabería, born out of the southern swamps of Florida." Their writing has been featured in The Gordian Review, Philly Inquirer and N.A.S.W Journal. They are a 2012 Leeway Foundation Arts & Change grant recipient and hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers Newark. Like most writers they have three jobs to pay bills and six side hustles to stay busy but their main love is always the poems.

David and Nic are the editors of the forthcoming anthology, Sana Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice out in next month through Common Notions.

How the Fascists Gathered Before, During, and After January 6

One could say that the January 6, 2021 storming of the US capitol was a groupuscular action. Individuals from various elements of the extreme right (Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, QAnon, boogaloo, run-of-the-mill MAGAists) converged in Washington, DC to protest the Congressional ratification of the Electoral College votes. Among the thousands who gathered, a few hundred invaded the Capitol grounds and the building itself. A mix of coordinated action (especially by ex-soldiers in the groups) and spontaneous crowd movement, the reactionary riot presents an update to the concept of the groupuscule. 

Rather than think of it as small in number (compared to what? one might ask), the groupuscule refers to forms of affinity, modes of gathering, and temporality. Groupuscules can be traced to tactical actions like flash mobs (temporary gatherings via minimal logistics and goals) and swarm operations (e.g., vigilantes who quickly mobilize through Facebook and WhatsApp groups to defend racist statues).[i] They can also refer to something broader, such as longer-term operations launchers like Anonymous. Platform-based groupuscules that make their way onto the streets sometimes have names (boogaloo, QAnon) and other times are events made up of named units (“The Jan 6 storming”). They converge and then scatter, and the afterlife of their connections can reform for future actions. 

Like other packs, or even lone wolves, groupuscules compose themselves via a bricolage of myths and images from different eras. Groupuscules combine “fragments of archaic discourses, recontextualized images, slang and recycled codes” to form a consistency.[ii] Groupuscular initiation rites are a hodgepodge of practices that get synthesized into “tradition” to create a fascist unity through time. And these are ultimately fantasy squads composed of friends, strangers, idols, martyrs, intermediaries, memes, comments, jokes, and images. Together these elements generate a groupuscule composed of simulations and interactions that result in an operationalized mythic otherworld that unleashes war. 

Groupuscules develop as networked armed men, with variable relations to the state. Sometimes they self-organize as security (e.g., vigilantes that harass in the name of nationalism with a cozy though occasionally conflictual relationship with police). At other times, groupuscules detach from their state training and status (ex-military) as mimics (militias, boogaloo). Groupuscules do not act as small parts of a larger state or party organization, yet they do not act as completely independent units either. They compose themselves as temporary and cellular (though states and parties do attempt to organize them), in other words, as bands and packs. 

Attention to groupuscules gives us a steppingstone to understand microfascism’s composition. Groupuscules have been named by Griffin as the microfascist mode of composition par excellence.[iii] The clustering of black holes is less identifiable than conventional political or social groups. Groupuscules might have common features but eschew proper names and identity over time.[iv] Instead, they contain “minute bursts of spontaneous creativity” that circulate “in a web of radical political energy fueling the vitality and viability of the organism as a whole.”[v] Key for microfascism, however, is how these molecular actions are drawn from war machines as well as patriarchal production of gender relations. To get to these, we need to examine a more distinct version of groupuscules rooted in war: the conventional Italian fascist types of affinity and action known as squadrismo.

Squadrismo

Even before Mussolini’s official call for the fasci di combattimento, brigades of Italian ex-volunteer assault specialists self-organized to attack their adversaries at meetings and on the streets.[vi] This form of bond and organization became known as squadrismo. The Italian micrological groupings would terrorize civilians to prevent other forms of organizing (labor unions, socialist parties) as well as to harass opponents of fascism. 

Squadrismo is not simply a thing of the past, even in Italy. It has been self-applied in recent revivals of Italian neo-fascist quarters, such as CasaPound, a group with a social center headquarters, propaganda campaigns, membership, and public events. Their identarian movement includes what they call squadrismo mediatico [media squadrism].[vii] We could also point to vigilante groups and gangs as contemporary versions of squadrismo.

Squads are perhaps most infamous in the past century in the form of paramilitary death squads, especially in Central and South America. Admiration for these death squads have been expressed by US right-wingers—from Larry Pratt’s 1990s book Armed People Victorious, which celebrated the use of anticommunist “citizen defense patrols” in Central America, to alt-right microfascists in fashwave memes and jokes about “free helicopter rides.”[viii]

Under certain conditions squadrismo has been groupuscularized. Historical forces have complicated the distinction in a few ways. First, as mentioned regarding Klan recomposition in the 1980s, non-state reactionary structures have shifted from strict hierarchies to “leaderless resistance.” The extreme right has promoted lone wolf and cellular actions without chains of command or communication, relying on provisional peer clusters for operational work. The squad in this instance would be loosely tied together, not a microcosm of a larger organizational structure. They would be closer to digital fascism,[ix] “on-the-spot” fascism,[x] or cyber-fascism.[xi]

Second, even conventional fascist squads weren’t simply units of organized action. The Freikorps were a self-organized mobile band of war veterans that the state subsequently incorporated and deployed for official fascist violence. The patriarchal pacts were composed through microfascist spiritual abstractions: the “elevation of militarism, male comradery, and heroic youth to a virtual cult.” Like the Freikorps, the Squadristi were veterans of WWI who continued the mission (duty, honor) without a formal war context. They were inspired by their bonding via combattentismo or “arditismo, the spirit that had driven young men who had fought as volunteers in assault units.”[xii] It’s the informality of these men of action, composing subjectivity through experience, abstractions, and fantasies, that makes squadrismo relevant to understanding microfascism. Their formal relation to a larger organization is important but secondary to its cultural resonances.

Third, the more recent version of squadrismo has been heavily technologized and mediated to the point of blurring it with the digital affordances of groupuscularization. Squads have become less a military dispatch unit and more of a cultural unit of association. Whether as friendship circles (Girl Squads, #squadgoals), corporate teams, influencer crews, or most relevantly gaming campaign clusters, the squad has become a defining sociological unit of association in the US. This recomposition of affinities is a result of labor management strategies (pooling worker intelligence and skills to spur collaboration-based value extraction for capital), the militarization of culture (especially gaming, which we’ll elaborate below), and everyday coping strategies for life under racialized capitalist patriarchy (e.g., friendship circles and support groups). Squadrismo has become groupuscularized, as has the lone wolf. Microfascism’s mediated and compositional logics thus need to be updated to consider the economic and political mutations as well as the rise of decentralized platforms for coordination.

Boogaloo movement and other Trumpist squadrismo

Other forms of squadrismo have become prominent. The aforementioned Trumpist caravans and flotillas are a case in point. In addition, the Trump 2020 campaign sought to raise a network of squads. Fundraising efforts included mailings from the “Army for Trump,” which offered donors a camouflaged MAGA hat identifying them as “the President’s first line of defense” ready to be mobilized against “the liberal MOB.”[xiii] The Army for Trump called for its foot soldiers to become poll-watchers during the November voting and supplied videos and detailed instructions on their roles and missions. Is it any wonder that thousands mobilized to fill the Capitol grounds as agitated mobs who saw themselves on the frontlines of America’s restoration? Or that that army continues its campaign via electoral recounts and fantasies of Trump’s restoration? 

While the Army for Trump still had some measure of integrating squads into a broader electoral apparatus, the on-the-ground actions were taken up by grassroots citizens empowered with digital tools, militant spirituality, and missionary zeal. We could see a more distributed version of squadrismo with QAnon’s recruitment of a digital army. In June 2020, the QAnon community circulated an “oath” in which a person vowed to become a “digital soldier.” Lt. General Michael Flynn, a hero among QAnon adherents, took it and started calling his followers “digital soldiers.” Many happily embraced the moniker, mostly working in various media channels to spread their belligerent gospel, including the delegitimation of the 2020 election and the Biden administration. But that digital army was only a prelude. Many QAnon followers believe that mass arrests of politicians and celebrities is imminent and will take the form of a military coup. Many are thus preparing for an actual civil war.

A related, but as of this writing more organized and deadly, groupuscular movement is that of the boogaloo bois, an extended memetic squad. With its syncretic uniforms of Hawaiian shirts, guns, and MAGA hats, the boogaloo bois came onto the street scene from the Internet in 2019 (like Anonymous did a decade and half earlier). Their bricolage was easily identifiable: camouflage cosplay, meme-patches, coded phrases, and vaporwave imagery comprised the aesthetics. What bonded them, beyond the pastiche memes and in-jokes, was a fixation on social collapse and a thirst for renewing civil war. The boogaloo bois are not just weapons buffs; they are future war reenactors, no matter how glitched out and fantasy based. They imagine and then act on digitally enhanced virtual wars projected through time. 

The boogaloo bois accelerated and guided lone-wolf stochastic action, including the fatal shooting by Steven Carrillo—an active-duty US Air Force staff sergeant and head of its anti-terrorism squadron—of a guard kiosk in Oakland, killing a sheriff’s officer and critically wounding another. Carrillo also detonated pipe bombs while lying in wait to attack officers, in addition to assaulting a firefighter and three other law enforcement officers.

Boogaloo bois compose a war machine, often from ex-state military, that targets other parts of the state (e.g., the “soup bois”— federal law enforcement “alphabet” agencies). It’s almost as though boogaloo bois were an experiment in reinventing Louis Beam’s “Leaderless Resistance.” Beam saw Leaderless Resistance as a sifting operation: “Those who join organizations to play ‘let’s pretend’ or who are ‘groupies’ will quickly be weeded out.”[xiv] While such a distinction might have mattered when Beam was writing, the new groupuscles are successful precisely because they can blur the lines through humor and irony to provide cover for stochastic action. 

As a populist war band, boogaloo bois link themselves to existing causes to further their own: instigating and accelerating a multilevel US war. While misogyny and harassment don’t seem to be expressed in their statements or images, the very reason for the existence of boogaloo bois plays into masculinist restorationist fantasies (even of a military without women). These are Civil War future reenactors, obsessed with pure war to the point of turning all innovation (memeing, joking) into its masculine restoration war. Neither meme nor movement, boogaloos embodied contemporary squadrismo, now spread out and connected via ephemeral digital culture. Their bricolage is an accelerationist machine that turns armchair warriors into armed street patrollers. 

Certainly, there are US state-based squads (notably in the Department of Homeland Security). But the contemporary variation of the squad is immersed in a networked composition as part of the cultural, subjective, microfascist sphere. They absorb the contemporary tools, affordances, and mythic fragments to bricolage themselves into groupuscular weapons. Meme warriors (shooters, spreaders, fans, meme-makers) are dedicated to restorationist victory. The new and reborn man is a soldier, only now detached from the state to kill and occasionally be killed. 

These death squads are necropolitical groupuscules that produce a life-destroying reality. They are also revivals of archaic groupuscules called Männerbünde. Contemporary microfascists ultimately seek to restore not any political system (e.g., a republic), economic structure, nor even a particular version of a race-based nation, but an order and sovereign process to shape reality. Through interconnected lone wolves, groupuscules, and squads, microfascism cultivates and expands its own lethal effects. It reinvokes Männerbund to unleash new men in patriarchal pacts, carrying the inherent life-destroying toxin of the Männerbund into social relations.

This is a trajectory towards permanent or total civil war, an acceleration of the war on women that seeks a final and collective separation from life in favor of a reunion with all abstractions. Decline, crisis, loss, and restoration: the interregnum’s dynamic forms the revival of Männerbünde. And the revival invokes the necrotic, as its rebirth always entails a simulated death. What happens if simulation is an abstraction that substitutes and reshapes reality? It’s a Männerbund’s world: one that only binds via an accelerated demise, a restorative victory that brings the peace that only comes with death.

Excerpted from Jack Z. Bratich, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death, (Common Notions, 2022) “War: Männerbunde and Microfascism,” pp. 92–95, 99–101, 117.

NOTES
[i] Joshua Partlow and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “As clashes between armed groups and leftist protesters turn deadly, police face complaints of tolerating vigilantes,” Washington Post, August 30, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-clashes-between-armed-groups-and-leftist-protesters-turn-deadly-police-face-complaints-of-tolerating-vigilantes/2020/08/30/d2c36c20-e952-11ea-a414-8422fa3e4116_story.html.

[ii] Genosko, “Black Holes of Politics,” 61. 

[iii] Griffin doesn’t cite Guattari directly on groupuscules (does so more on rhizomatic networks) though the term is found scattered in Guattari’s writings. Guattari tends to use it as a synonym for “splinter groups” (associated with Trotskyism) or perhaps “cells.” They don’t seem to have the amorphous and distributed character that Griffin ascribes to them. 

[iv] Marco Deseriis, Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

[v] Griffin, A Fascist Century, 199.

[vi] Mimmo Franzinelli, “Squadrism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. R. J. B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 91–108; Maddalena Gretel Cammelli, “Fascism as a Style of Life: Community Life and Violence in a Neofascist Movement in Italy,” Focaal––Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 79 (2017): 89–101.

[vii] Cammelli, “Fascism as a Style of Life,” 96.

[viii] Matt Novak, “Why Are Trump Supporters Offering People ‘Free Helicopter Rides’ Online?” Gizmodo, October 12, 2018,

https://gizmodo.com/why-are-trump-supporters-offering-people-free-helicopte-1829705238.

[ix] Griffin, “From Slime Mould to Rhizome,” 31.

[ix] Fielitz and Marcks, “Digital Fascism.”

[x] Antoine Acker, “How Fascism Went Digital: A Historian’s Perspective on Bolsonaro’s Victory in Brazil,” Geschichte der Gegenwart (2018), https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/203848/1/Acker_How_Fascism_Went_Digital.pdf.

[xi] Griffin, “Interregnum or Endgame?,” 171.

[xii] Franzinelli, “Squadrism,” 91.

[xiii] Luna, “The Only Possible Way.” 

[xiv] Beam, “Leaderless Resistance.”