With everything going on in the US I am seeing more and more of these takes by Mastodons anarchists and I once again fail to understand how their alternative would work. Especially coming out of an intensively individualized system like capitalism, how do you just do no hiearchies? And why is the State always just the cops and military, would someone think about the infrastructure, hospitals, schools…
I am biased, because I am most definitely a statist. Mainly because I have studied them and work in the public sector. It is surprisingly a lot that goes into seemingly mundane things like city planning or the planning and implementation of services of any kind, you do need experts for it. Even in luxury space communism, someone is going to have to steer the ship and design it.
I don’t know, from real life experience I know that when for example there is an emergency, people do self-organize. But at the same time I have not once experienced this happening without a hierarchy forming almost instantly.
The state doesn’t enable infrastructure to exist, nor hospitals nor schools. People do. And people will still do it without a state. You can look up mutual aid and the book anarchy works for more details on how that would look.
People can coordinate amongst each other without the state or even majoritarian rule (majoritarian rule meaning something like direct democracy, which many anarchists still oppose). On a small enough level, things like consensus can work, although you’ll get a lot of different responses to how large scale projects, like energy grids or rail networks, should operate. The more locally autonomous the solution, the more support it’ll typically get from anarchists though.
That’s not to say they think every decision must be made via consensus. Groups can still empower someone within them to make coordination decisions for convenience. The main idea there is that the coordinator can be replaced at the will of the coordinated, thus holding the coordinator accountable (unlike a boss).