Liberal democracies - I don't even know what you mean by that.
Unless you can come up with a really effective way of completely escaping the gravity well of capitalism by thursday, we're not going to find a 'solution' anytime soon that isn't a compromise - which some 'liberal democracies' have done pretty well.
Our job as adults is to keep the people we have elected in check. To reward them for being effective structural organisers, and punish them when, inevitably, they start thinking they are more than public servants who serve us.
As much as I appreciate the fantasy of anarchism, I honestly do not believe we are terribly good, as individuals, at self-organising. If we had a hive-mind, it would all be great, but we don't.
We need leaders to organise our energies and our resources in ways that benefit us. And some do pretty well for a while, but inevitably, they start to think they don't serve us. Every single one of them.
Then they have to go. It's our responsibility to be intolerant of their inevitable overreach.
@Remittancegirl Anarchism has a PR problem.
When it works is not much advertised and modern anarchists have quite a culture of anti-marketing.
This said, according to Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, the Commune in Barcelona was very well organized.
Largely, it is a matter of culture.
There are other models, of course.
I've been involved in a co-housing group that used a flat hierarchy to make some very important decisions about how to build an apartment building and while it worked, it took years to build the culture that made it possible.
But it's possible.
Rojava and Chiapas are two more examples.
It's a limit of our Western imagination and the necessity of building a different culture, not a limit of nature.
But it is equally our job to allow ourselves to be led. Not like obedient children, not as devoted followers of a demagogue, but as customers on a guided tour.
When they start leading us to places we don't and shouldn't want to go, it's time to fire them and get a new tour group leader.
Politicians want you to believe it's all more serious and glamorous than that, because that allows them to appear irreplaceable and worthy of leeway.
But it's not.
We pay them. We pay them to lead us on a tour of how to be a sane, relatively fair society.
I do not understand why so many people forget this. WE PAY THEM. They work for us.
I've been thinking about this in the context of Kier Starmer, and why I strongly think he (and probably those around him) need to go.
Because from almost the moment after they were elected, they started acting like parents who know better what is good for us. The fantasy (right or wrong) of knowing what's best for an electorate is just another more sterile version of a father-figure.
And please, fantasy martyrs are not an adequate alternative.
@Remittancegirl I think you're mistaken about anarchism. We are inherently very good at self organising, although that does break down to some extent at the scale of the societies we have today.
Self organising societies cannot tolerate significant disparities of wealth of influence, and with the population density and speed of communication we have today it's hard to have insulation between functional social units.
I became an anarchist and feminist for the same reason that my aunt became a teetotaller. She couldn't drink healthily and knew that it would kill her if she didn't stop, so she stopped. I have a lot of respect for her for doing that, since a lot of her life was structured around drinking and it took a long time to rebuild to a new way of living.
I use this as a comparison because I agree entirely with @Remittancegirl 's description of how people behave around authority in a democracy. We have shown that we cannot deal with it healthily as a society, and it will kill us, so we need to remove it from our lives.
There is a fantasy that "maybe we can just start dealing with authority healthily" and I think this is the sort of self-deception that a lot of people with addictions go through when they start to realise. Before I gave up caffeine I spent a long time thinking "well, other people can ingest it healthily, so I can do that too" before realising that no I couldn't, they could but I couldn't. It wouldn't have killed me but it was very bad for my health.
As any person who's gone through a psychological dependence can tell you, one of the hardest things is restructuring your life so as not to need the thing. How do you get to sleep without alcohol? How do you get up without caffeine? How do you relax without tobacco? What do you do when you're bored? We've all heard people say "well, I can't go to sleep without drinking, so I guess I can't stop drinking" and we know what comes next.
And this is the way I view anarchism: it is the attempt to remove authority from our lives, and to find a way to live without it, because we know we aren't healthy without it. The hard bit is that restructuring.
This is why, when someone says "but how would we have X with anarchism?" I view the question with sympathy: they're somewhere between the denial and bargaining stages. A direct answer will not make sense to them, any more than the answer "well, you just get up and be awake without caffeine" would have made sense to me.
Well, since I am speaking of us know, with our wealth disparities and our density, and not of some fantasy hunter-gatherer society we are NOT, I beg to disagree.
