Can Anarchism work?

[Redalgo]

Yes, though I do not believe it would "work" better than most of its alternatives.

A cluster of communities could form a union with its own system of governance provided it lacks the power to do more than ask for people to voluntarily comply with its suggestions. Direct democracy could be utilized in small villages of people whose residents can either adhere to the outcomes of votes or pick up and leave for another community. Maybe some sort of council system could be utilized so long as it all remains non-coercive and emphasizes egalitarian values. These approaches may be similar to how a lot of Native American nations were organized, presumably for millennia, with success.

Depending on how far anarchism as a label could be stretched, as one can have a government without it being a proper state, people could also experiment with a system in which government does much of what it already does in the West but people get to choose whether they opt in or out of particular forms of compliance with the law. Alternatively, under a system of panarchism citizen-consumers could shop around for governments on a contractual basis but none of those regimes would have exclusion control over any amount of territory - with jurisdictions entirely overlapping one another.

Mind you, this assumes we are talking about the absence of state rather than of all conceivable forms of government. I'm not even sure it is possible in our species to demolish all conceivable hierarchies unless each person lives in complete isolation from others for the duration of their lives.