As more mainstream libs are discovering Lemmy, we're seeing a pattern of complaints that opinions outside the ones they deem acceptable are allowed on the platform. We've even seen instances defederating because their userbase does not wish to be exposed to these views.
Interestingly, these are the same people who level censorship and control of free speech as their main critique of communists. What we're seeing is that these people absolutely don't care about free speech. They understand the necessity of censorship and actively advocate censoring opinions that they find dangerous. Yet, when societies based on values different from their own use these same tools they screech about authoritarianism.
Turns out it's not authoritarianism libs hate, but having their own views censored. What actually offends them about places like China is that it's their ideology that's being suppressed there.
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.