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.”