… if all the house organs of the smugosphere (I won’t mention names) were devoting at least one whole issue a year to the questions of Pathological Activist Cultures (1) – what are they, where they come from, what sustains them, what damage they do (short-term, long-term), what has been tried to overcome them (did it work? if so, for how long? If not, what ELSE was tried?), what else might work and what resources would be required, what resistance could reasonably be expected and what one might do when faced with that resistance, who we might learn from, how we might know if we were “succeeding.” For starters. Also, How do these cultures get spoken of? Represented in activist products (books, blogs, etc), in mainstream culture etc.
This, of course, would involve a good hard look in the mirror. Under klieg lights. With our eyelids retracted like in A Clockwork Orange (2).
Not. Gonna. Happen.
This rant inspired by this excellent letter in a magazine that just dropped through the letterbox today.
Footnotes
(1) Fun fact – I went to a school with the initials PAC. Still trying to undo the damage (there were good bits too, obvs).
(2) Perhaps instead of Beethoven, the obligatory soundtrack could be either David Rovics’ “I’m a better anarchist than you” or – if you were really feeling sadistic – one of Marc Hudson’s interminable droning videos…
marchudson.net 
Hi Marc, thanks for your thought-provoking blog. You might like this podcast in which writer M.E. O’Brien talks about her new book Family Abolition and how the modern / capitalist family unit undermines revolutionary struggles and social movements https://plutopress.podbean.com/e/family-abolition-with-m-e-o-brien/.
Dan
Cheers, I will have a listen