GenZedong

Sure, but MLs aren't promoting unjust hierarchies either, there's no disagreement on the point of accountability and recall. And of course, anarchism is a very broad ideology with many different interpretations. For example, I do think that anarcho-syndicalism is generally close to ML ideologically. So, it is a fair criticism to say that I oversimplified things in my comment.

While it's true that MLs in the west haven't accomplished much recently, I don't think anarchists have much to show for their efforts either. Organizing street-level protests and punching nazis is great, but unless that is a step towards actual systemic change then these actions aren't accomplishing much of anything in the grand scheme of things. US has protests every few years, but they always die down and life moves on as if nothing happened. We see the same story in France a well where people are even better at rioting, yet they aren't moving the needle either.

So, perhaps we shouldn't disparage book clubs after all. Lack of education is one of the key reasons people aren't organizing effectively. People end up doing naive things that result in ad hoc protests that quickly burn themselves out. Learning history of effective movement building, methods that work, and building ideological convictions necessary to make a long term impact is the first step that can't be skipped over. Russian revolution started out effectively as a bunch of book clubs where workers read and discussed communist literature. It took over a decade of coordinated effort to build an effective movement.

The reality is that ML approach does have a lot of demonstrated success when done seriously as seen in USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, Korea, Laos, and Nicaragua. These are all large scale demonstrated successes, and they should be studied intensively by everyone on the left in the west.