It’s important to understand that anarchism is a bottom-up system of governance rather than top-down. Solutions to problems are discovered procedurally and organically by a society of individuals that agree from the outset to basic, simple rules which merely allow that process to occur: Stripped down, simply mutual respect and direct communication. Therefore if you try to understand anarchism as a pre-defined system like a democratic republic, your understanding will be frustrated. There are no singular answers to the questions you pose as there is no singular anarchist system. What is important and constant is that a group agrees from the outset to behave as a cooperative community of equivalent individuals. Anarchism is emergent, rather than prescriptive. And if you do not have that mutual agreement from the outset, you cannot yet do anarchism.
A solution to the group size issue you pose is nested communes, a proven system for scaling anarchist society. It’s basically an inverted hierarchy: Hyperlocal communes of 50-100 individuals make all the final decisions right from the outset, on all matters that are destined to affect them. Then they send usually two messengers from their commune to a “higher” coordinating commune where they meet with the messengers from 25-50 other communes. These messengers are not “representatives” like in a democratic republic! They do not make new decisions. They are merely delivering their commune’s decision. It is then the job of this coordinating commune to cohere all of the delivered decisions from their constituent communes, through a number of pre-decided procedural conflict resolution methods. If there are conflicts between commune decisions that cannot be cohered and resolved through these methods, the decision can go no further and the issue gets passed back to the constituent communes to discuss again. Messengers don’t make new decisions without their home commune! The members of each commune know this, so they’re aware that sending out decisions that are bullheaded / undiplomatic / selfish / uncompromising are likely to cause a lockup and be rejected, therefore are incentivized to come to decisions that are agreeable and readily negotiable in advance. They are likely to phone up the next commune over when they make these decisions to double check that they’re on the same page, and negotiate changes to their decisions in advance. Many lines of direct communication are incentivized even before the messengers are sent to the coordinating commune. Everyone in this web is incentivized to be in dialog, or they could possibly delay getting what they want.
So, one coordinating commune can contain the regional consensus of ~5,000 people across 50 constituent communes. Once the decisions within that level 1 coordinating commune are cohered, if they also concern people outside of that 5,000 person region they can then proceed to a level 2 coordinating commune via another two messengers from the level 1! Same process as before, and 5,000 people grows to 250,000. The largest branch of governance in AANES, the Kurdish-led region of northern Syria, is a nested commune like this one (Liberal-style political parties exist in a separate, smaller branch). With roughly 4.5 million participants, they require IIRC 4 levels of this system and decisions can go from top to bottom (Or bottom to top, depending on how you see it) in a few weeks which is actually faster in many cases than a liberal congress. AANES is liberalizing and top-down structure has been formalizing out there, re-colonizing the social sphere, but last I heard most of these communes still meet daily.
Oh and as for the “tragedy of the commons”, that is a problem specific to capitalism and other hierarchical hoarding systems. If you ask an anthropologist they’ll tell you that this problem literally does not occur outside niche situations where people normalized to capitalism suddenly find themselves outside of that system having to manage resources for themselves (Like a shipwreck stranding). It simply does not occur in societies that have not been introduced and normalized into hierarchical hoarding. In fact the sheep pasturing example often used to illustrate the myth is a situation that was managed through anarchist-style mutual aid back when people really did have to communicate and cooperate with their neighbors to share a commons like grassland. Shepherds weren’t constantly in conflict with each other and running out of grass! They understood that they had to cooperate to survive! Tragedy of the commons is straight up capitalist propaganda.
It’s important to understand that anarchism is a bottom-up system of governance rather than top-down. Solutions to problems are discovered procedurally and organically by a society of individuals that agree from the outset to basic, simple rules which merely allow that process to occur: Stripped down, simply mutual respect and direct communication. Therefore if you try to understand anarchism as a pre-defined system like a democratic republic, your understanding will be frustrated. There are no singular answers to the questions you pose as there is no singular anarchist system. What is important and constant is that a group agrees from the outset to behave as a cooperative community of equivalent individuals. Anarchism is emergent, rather than prescriptive. And if you do not have that mutual agreement from the outset, you cannot yet do anarchism.
A solution to the group size issue you pose is nested communes, a proven system for scaling anarchist society. It’s basically an inverted hierarchy: Hyperlocal communes of 50-100 individuals make all the final decisions right from the outset, on all matters that are destined to affect them. Then they send usually two messengers from their commune to a “higher” coordinating commune where they meet with the messengers from 25-50 other communes. These messengers are not “representatives” like in a democratic republic! They do not make new decisions. They are merely delivering their commune’s decision. It is then the job of this coordinating commune to cohere all of the delivered decisions from their constituent communes, through a number of pre-decided procedural conflict resolution methods. If there are conflicts between commune decisions that cannot be cohered and resolved through these methods, the decision can go no further and the issue gets passed back to the constituent communes to discuss again. Messengers don’t make new decisions without their home commune! The members of each commune know this, so they’re aware that sending out decisions that are bullheaded / undiplomatic / selfish / uncompromising are likely to cause a lockup and be rejected, therefore are incentivized to come to decisions that are agreeable and readily negotiable in advance. They are likely to phone up the next commune over when they make these decisions to double check that they’re on the same page, and negotiate changes to their decisions in advance. Many lines of direct communication are incentivized even before the messengers are sent to the coordinating commune. Everyone in this web is incentivized to be in dialog, or they could possibly delay getting what they want.
So, one coordinating commune can contain the regional consensus of ~5,000 people across 50 constituent communes. Once the decisions within that level 1 coordinating commune are cohered, if they also concern people outside of that 5,000 person region they can then proceed to a level 2 coordinating commune via another two messengers from the level 1! Same process as before, and 5,000 people grows to 250,000. The largest branch of governance in AANES, the Kurdish-led region of northern Syria, is a nested commune like this one (Liberal-style political parties exist in a separate, smaller branch). With roughly 4.5 million participants, they require IIRC 4 levels of this system and decisions can go from top to bottom (Or bottom to top, depending on how you see it) in a few weeks which is actually faster in many cases than a liberal congress. AANES is liberalizing and top-down structure has been formalizing out there, re-colonizing the social sphere, but last I heard most of these communes still meet daily.
Oh and as for the “tragedy of the commons”, that is a problem specific to capitalism and other hierarchical hoarding systems. If you ask an anthropologist they’ll tell you that this problem literally does not occur outside niche situations where people normalized to capitalism suddenly find themselves outside of that system having to manage resources for themselves (Like a shipwreck stranding). It simply does not occur in societies that have not been introduced and normalized into hierarchical hoarding. In fact the sheep pasturing example often used to illustrate the myth is a situation that was managed through anarchist-style mutual aid back when people really did have to communicate and cooperate with their neighbors to share a commons like grassland. Shepherds weren’t constantly in conflict with each other and running out of grass! They understood that they had to cooperate to survive! Tragedy of the commons is straight up capitalist propaganda.