>The problem is that the Bolsheviks killed it all off and replaced it with an authoritarian hellscape.
I'd rather live in the Soviet Union than in some mutualist neighbourhood association because the former was positively productive in comparison. There's a good essay called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"[1], showcasing that getting rid of formal hierarchies doesn't get rid of power structures, it just renders them informal, you're essentially back to the state of nature. There's no position on earth that attracts worse people than "neighbourhood captain" or the local school or housing committee.
Nobody wants to live in a community where you have to vote ten times per week if you want to replace a broken door lock. And that's not a sarcastic hypothetical, that is a real thing I experienced when I lived in a cooperatively owned housing complex in Hamburg as a student.
You're not wrong. It's sort of what I was alluding to with the whole "you can't just smash the state" comment. Kudos for providing a citation for an idea that's been bouncing around my head for a long while now, hopefully I'll remember the name this time.
Certain things should not actually be under democratic control. Changing out the door lock, for example, has absolutely no reason to be a thing that should require a vote, because it only affects you. The whole concept of an HOA is a parody of the democratic form, because it involves forcing people to agree on things where agreement is not actually necessary. This is not liberty, it is tyranny.
You'd get both if your HOA took over your country, staffed the senate with the people who regularly attend the HOA meetings, and put courts in the hands of your local school boards.
We can talk a lot about how the hierarchies should be managed, but I think it's pretty clear that hierarchies themselves are a fundamental, natural part of human societies, and you can't just do away with them.
The way I see it, our intuitive social skills work best when living in groups under roughly the Dunbar's number[0]. At that level, everyone knows everyone else personally, so you don't need laws and power structures: everyone keeps everyone else in check, people cooperate and self-organize naturally. When a group grows above that, and two random members are unlikely to know each other well, those natural, automatic methods stop working, and the group risks disintegration.
The group can always split into two at this point, and this is what often happens in practice, but then two independent groups competing over shared resources will eventually start fighting[1]. The alternative is to scale up, and the tried and true method humans historically keep arriving at is hierarchies. A ruling group can coordinate multiple independent Dunbar-strong subgroups, but the coordination mechanisms need to become explicit now: hence laws, policing, monopoly on violence. This trick allows a society to scale up some two orders of magnitude, but then the ruling group hits a capacity limit. The solution is... to add another level to hierarchy. This buys you another two orders of magnitude. Repeat as needed.
I don't know of any studies to link here that would back this reasoning up - but it does track per my understanding of group dynamics, economics, and of course it seems to map well to modern and historical administrative divisions, when looking at population numbers.
[1] - I can imagine this being the original reason people started forming larger groups: in a world full of ~100-person strong competing tribes, scaling your tribe up to 200 or 500 people makes you invulnerable against all the other 100-people tribes (at least individually).
I'd rather live in the Soviet Union than in some mutualist neighbourhood association because the former was positively productive in comparison. There's a good essay called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"[1], showcasing that getting rid of formal hierarchies doesn't get rid of power structures, it just renders them informal, you're essentially back to the state of nature. There's no position on earth that attracts worse people than "neighbourhood captain" or the local school or housing committee.
Nobody wants to live in a community where you have to vote ten times per week if you want to replace a broken door lock. And that's not a sarcastic hypothetical, that is a real thing I experienced when I lived in a cooperatively owned housing complex in Hamburg as a student.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...