1.6 and 4.6 million people is an extremely small population

Respectfully I have to disagree there.

As the population scales up a centralized government is inevitable because the system has too many moving parts.

I haven’t found that to be the case in my research. Decentralized modes of society appear to scale very well as long as it is combined with federation.

To make any of this happen globally, or even just a country, you have to rely on all people behaving differently than they have for the past several thousand years. Human tribalism, selfishness, and greed were a problem way before capitalism was a thing.

While hierarchical oppressive societies have been prevalent for the past 8,000 years, new evidence shows that before that, the norm for humans were egalitarian societies, so our current path is quite an aberration from that norm. If you’d like to delve into that research yourself, you can read it for free here.

1930’s Catalonia and Rojava are very solid evidence that with the right societal structure, we can actually bring out that latent egalitarian ability of humans. People who lived through what happened in Catalonia described there being a period of acclimation to the concept of things being free, yet only taking what you need, but that once people understood that there would be more waiting for them later, they quickly adapted to living in a post-scarcity fashion. There’s a good documentary on that topic here, if you’re interested.

It does work in communities around the world, though each community can do it differently. You can look into the practice of consensus for a general way of doing that.

“Consensus decision making is a creative and dynamic way of reaching agreement between all members of a group. Instead of simply voting for an item and having the majority of the group get their way, a consensus group is committed to finding solutions that everyone actively supports, or at least can live with. All decisions are made with the consent of everyone involved, and this ensures that all opinions, ideas and concerns are taken into account. Through listening closely to each other, the group aims to come up with proposals that work for everyone. Consensus is neither compromise nor unanimity - it aims to go further by weaving together everyone’s best ideas and key concerns - a process that often results in surprising and creative solutions, inspiring both the individual and the group as a whole. At the heart of consensus is a respectful dialogue between equals. It’s about how to work with each other rather than for or against each other - it rejects side taking, point scoring and strategic manoeuvring. Consensus is looking for ‘win win’ solutions that are acceptable to all, with the direct benefit that everyone agrees with the final decision, resulting in a greater commitment to actually turning it into reality.” (from the book “A Consensus Handbook” by Seeds For Change)

And adding:

“The 2001 popular rebellion in Argentina saw people take an unprecedented level of control over their lives. They formed neighborhood assemblies, took over factories and abandoned land, created barter networks, blockaded highways to compel the government to grant relief to the unemployed, held the streets against lethal police repression, and forced four presidents and multiple vice presidents and economic ministers to resign in quick succession. Through it all, they did not appoint leadership, and most of the neighborhood assemblies rejected political parties and trade unions trying to co-opt these spontaneous institutions. Within the assemblies, factory occupations, and other organizations, they practiced consensus and encouraged horizontal organizing. In the words of one activist involved in establishing alternative social structures in his neighborhood, where unemployment reached 80%: “We are building power, not taking it.” People formed over 200 neighborhood assemblies in Buenos Aires alone, involving thousands of people; according to one poll, one in three residents of the capital had attended an assembly. People began by meeting in their neighborhoods, often over a common meal, or olla popular. Next they would occupy a space to serve as a social center—in many cases, an abandoned bank.” / “The city of Gwangju (or Kwangju), in South Korea, liberated itself for six days in May, 1980, after student and worker protests against the military dictatorship escalated in response to declarations of martial law. Protestors burned down the government television station and seized weapons, quickly organizing a “Citizen Army” that forced out the police and military. As in other urban rebellions, including those in Paris in 1848 and 1968, in Budapest in 1919, and in Beijing in 1989, students and workers in Gwangju quickly formed open assemblies to organize life in the city and communicate with the outside world. Participants in the uprising tell of a complex organizational system developed spontaneously in a short period of time—and without the leaders of the main student groups and protest organizations, who had already been arrested. Their system included a Citizen’s Army, a Situation Center, a Citizen-Student Committee, a Planning Board, and departments for local defense, investigation, information, public services, burial of the dead, and other services. It took a full-scale invasion by special units of the Korean military with US support to crush the rebellion and prevent it from spreading. Several hundred people were killed in the process. Even its enemies described the armed resistance as “fierce and wellorganized.” The combination of spontaneous organization, open assemblies, and committees with a specific organizational focus left a deep impression, showing how quickly a society can change itself once it breaks with the habit of obedience to the government. In the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, state power collapsed after masses of student protestors armed themselves; much of the country fell into the hands of the people, who had to reorganize the economy and quickly form militias to repel Soviet invasion. Initially, each city organized itself spontaneously, but the forms of organization that arose were very similar, perhaps because they developed in the same cultural and political context. Hungarian anarchists were influential in the new Revolutionary Councils, which federated to coordinate defense, and they took part in the workers’ councils that took over the factories and mines. In Budapest old politicians formed a new government and tried to harness these autonomous councils into a multiparty democracy, but the influence of the government did not extend beyond the capital city in the days before the second Soviet invasion succeeded in crushing the uprising. Hungary did not have a large anarchist movement at the time, but the popularity of the various councils shows how contagious anarchistic ideas are once people decide to organize themselves. And their ability to keep the country running and defeat the first invasion of the Red Army shows the effectiveness of these organizational forms. There was no need for a complex institutional blueprint to be in place before people left their authoritarian government behind. All they needed was the determination to come together in open meetings to decide their futures, and the trust in themselves that they could make it work, even if at first it was unclear how.” / “Peasants in Spain had been oppressed throughout centuries of feudalism. The partial revolution in 1936 enabled them to reclaim the privilege and wealth their oppressors had derived from their labors. Peasant assemblies in liberated villages met to decide how to redistribute territory seized from large landowners, so those who had labored as virtual serfs could finally have access to land. Unlike the farcical Reconciliation Commissions arranged in South Africa, Guatemala, and elsewhere, which protect oppressors from any real consequences and above all preserve the unequal distribution of power and privilege that is the direct result of past oppressions, these assemblies empowered the Spanish peasants to decide for themselves how to recover their dignity and equality. Aside from redistributing land, they also took over pro-fascist churches and luxury villas to be used as community centers, storehouses, schools, and clinics. In five years of state-instituted agrarian reform, Spain’s Republican government redistributed only 876,327 hectares of land; in just a few weeks of revolution, the peasants seized 5,692,202 hectares of land for themselves. This figure is even more significant considering that this redistribution was opposed by Republicans and Socialists, and could only take place in the part of the country not controlled by the fascists.” / “In the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico, the Zapatistas rose up in 1994 and won autonomy for dozens of indigenous communities. Named after Mexican peasant revolutionary Zapata and espousing a mix of indigenous, Marxist, and anarchist ideas, the Zapatistas formed an army guided by popular “encuentros,” or gatherings, to fight back against neoliberal capitalism and the continuing forms of exploitation and genocide inflicted by the Mexican state. To lift these communities up out of poverty following generations of colonialism, and to help counter the effects of military blockades and harassment, the Zapatistas called for support. Thousands of volunteers and people with technical experience came from around the world to help Zapatista communities build up their infrastructure” / “Throughout the 2006 rebellion in Oaxaca [within Mexico], as well as before and after, indigenous culture was a wellspring of resistance. However much they exemplified cooperative, anti-authoritarian, and ecologically sustainable behaviors before colonialism, indigenous peoples in the Oaxacan resistance came to cherish and emphasize the parts of their culture that contrasted with the system that values property over life, encourages competition and domination, and exploits the environment into extinction. Their ability to practice an anti-authoritarian and ecological culture—working together in a spirit of solidarity and nourishing themselves on the small amount of land they had—increased the potency of their resistance, and thus their very chances for survival. Thus, resistance to capitalism and the state is both a means of protecting indigenous cultures and a crucible that forges a stronger anti-authoritarian ethos.” / “Throughout Europe, dozens of autonomous villages have built a life outside capitalism. Especially in Italy, France, and Spain, these villages exist outside regular state control and with little influence from the logic of the market. Sometimes buying cheap land, often squatting abandoned villages, these new autonomous communities create the infrastructure for a libertarian, communal life and the culture that goes with it. These new cultures replace the nuclear family with a much broader, more inclusive and flexible family united by affinity and consensual love rather than bloodlines and proprietary love; they destroy the division of labor by gender, weaken age segregation and hierarchy, and create communal and ecological values and relationships.” (from the book “Anarchy Works” by Peter Gelderloos)

But if that delegate (and the council itself) has no more authority than the people they represent, anyone who feels their position isn’t being represented can raise the issue and represent themselves or their point of view. These types of systems are reliant on civic engagement far exceeding what most people in the western world would consider possible.

This is also part of why many anarchists make the distinction of just vs unjust hierarchy. Just hierarchy is when the respected elder or community organizer in a neighborhood represents the neighborhoods interest in the council, and has regular meetings with the people they represent to ensure all views are represented. Unjust hierarchy is when 51% of the 20% of the population that actually voted puts the person who invested the most money into their campaign in charge.

The point is to structure your society in a horizontal way such that no person or group of people has any degree of power greater than any other, and has no method of gaining greater power. As I’ve said elsewhere, there are miriad ways of accomplishing this, and each community tends to have solutions that work for them even if that solution wouldn’t work for another community.