I think an example of what is being addressed is found in occupy wall street. The movement had presented itself as self-led, or leaderless, yet it had de facto leaders, particularly David Graeber. In name it was pure democracy but in form it was a shadow leadership choosing its direction. The vanguard approach may or may not be beyond reproach, but it attempts to admit the natural reality of a vanguard which seems to arise regardless. Some people are skilled, persuasive, knowledgeable, and have the time to perform tasks for an organization and these people will either be recognized and put in leadership roles, or will find themselves there haphazardly and further, they may be rejected due to anti-authoritarian dogmatism. The trick is, of course, maintaining a continuity with the people the group is serving, not necessarily determining how decisions are or aren’t made.

In my own experience with self-proclaimed anarchists, for example in a small-time prisoner advocacy group, the same problem arises. No one can take responsibility for certain tasks because of a risk for creating a chain of command and thus my partner and I were blocked from taking on roles because roles were seen as problematic by the rest of the group. Of course, the group failed, and I left.

I find that this is partially the result of anarchism as it is usually known and practiced in my community but also, and perhaps more importantly, it is a result of reaction to neoliberalism. Our age of neoliberalism has led to an increase of powerlessness and blatantly corrupt liberal “democracy.” People want to combat this by feeling as though everyone has a say and everyone has power. It is the ultimate legitimacy to claim as much. This is achieved, at times, by rejecting anything that even seems “top down.” In effect, the organization strategy is usurped by dogma for the purposes of what you might call “owning the authoritarians” in what might be a kind of ideological virtue signaling. I don’t usually like the term “populism” but when merely harnessing reactions to neoliberalism, “populism” is usually the result, not democracy, and not socialism.

I will also add that IMO, the most interesting and effective “anarchist” or anti-authoritarian strategies are most effective for survival - expropriation attempts, food sovereignty, squatting on abandoned land etc., but not as effective at consequentially shifting power.

We need to learn how to survive in the society of states that are dominated by capitalist relations and disciplined by markets controlled by colonial powers, but we must also figure out how to address these power structures. IMO ML actually steps up to the plate in this regard by seeking to usurp the state and rediscipline it towards the people. I don’t think it’s ideal because no solution can be perfect and certainly states (especially peripheral and semi peripheral states under the yoke of imperialism) are subjected to many pitfalls which can potentially erode continuity between the state and the people, or can fall into liberal fallacies, or outside meddling influences, but still, we must do more than reject authoritarianism ™ to address the problem of the society of states.

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.

Unfortunately it was neither who really dealt with him