there’s no group which perceives the abusive dynamics of this civilization with a greater degree of intellectual clarity as a whole.

...except for anarcho-communists who actually know what they're talking about.

I don't disagree with this as a whole--Marxists are pretty much dead on with most of their analysis and see the world a hell of a lot more clearly than people still indoctrinated by capitalism. The problem is that Marxists-Leninists don't go far enough when they diagnose the problems with capitalist society. They think it's enough that power structures are seized by the proletariat and set up to align with their interests, as they believe (based on their analysis of how societies work) this will inherently cause the power structures to wither away over time. But that's not how power works. You can't fully reduce it down to class conflict.

When a Marxist says "the history of societies is the history of class struggle", imo there are two ways to read it: (a) Class and class struggle has made up the core of all societies' structure and general existence for all history; or (b) There is nothing else to societies' structure or general existence that is not reducible to class and class struggle

I agree with (a). It's supported by history and evidence. (b) inherently can't be because it presupposes itself.

From my own understanding of history, I think that a strictly ML understanding of how societies work misses a vitally important aspect of the role power plays. I could be wrong about that! But I've yet to see a ML explanation of why it's necessarily wrong. And I think the reason for that it because ML theory presupposes itself. It wants to say (b). And in that sense, I think it's actually a wildly un-humble framework: not only does it make the bold claim that all of history is just class, it forms the basis for governments that force this restrictive historical understanding on people and dismiss any other framework as liberal or reactionary.

As the article claims about MLs, there are plenty of anarchists who don't know what they're talking about--who have a really shallow understanding of power or are secretly just liberals. But anarcho-communism is thus far the only framework I've found that addresses all of the historical dynamics and structures identified by Marx and Marxists while still being humble enough to admit that it doesn't necessarily hold all the right answers and that it's not the only valid framework out there.