Anarchism is a bit of a fantasy once it encounters reality, like most political ideologies. The most viable attempt at an anarcho-government was in spain before Franco. It failed in terms of running a functional country, with the short lived experiment being unable to even decide whether to arm the few defenders against Franco’s authoritarian capture of the country – Durruti had to basically raid/steal weapons for his troops to mount any kind of resistance.

So literature I’d recommend is basically spanish history.

I think if you’re asking questions about communism and anarchism, it makes most sense to ask those questions where communists and anarchists hang out, rather than communities that tend to be more liberal. For clarity, I’m a Marxis-Leninist that used to be an anarchist.

Anarchism is primarily about communalization and decentralization of production and distribution. Anarchists view the state as a monopoly on violence and an unjustifiable hierarchy, and so seek to establish horizontalist structures and production methods that are more local than interconnected where possible. Think community self-reliance, with minor trade between cells.

An Anarchist FAQ tends to be valued among anarchists as a good but lengthy intro.

It’s more of a philosophy than a system of governance. A government that follows anarchist ideals would not incarcerate people much, but would do a lot to make sure private individuals can’t attain much power over each other. It would be focused on preventing a tiered class system from forming and making sure people aren’t critically dependent on a single employer.

I’m going to recommend My anarchist manifesto at https://soulism.net/. It’s not an economic or legal manifesto, but a scientific and spiritual manifesto for a new kind of worldview to apply to society and identity.

As I understand it, anarchism is less about eliminating laws and more about eliminating hierarchy. It’s bottom-up governance that requires lots of participation from everyone involved. You and your peers can establish laws for your neighborhood/town/etc., but everyone affected by that law needs to directly participate in its writing and there must be broad consensus before it is enacted. Law enforcement must be communal; you cannot outsource it to a police force, lest the police become oppressive.

When I think of anarchism I sometimes think of colonial New England: small towns that are largely autonomous, where communal decisions are made at town hall meetings and the locals manage themselves. It’s not a perfect analogy since there were higher levels of government, but day-to-day governance was very grass-roots.

I was part of a protest camp with around 5000 people that was organized according to anarchist ideals, for one week.
We organized in groups of ~10 people who each selected one delegate to attend a daily “village” plenum.
There were 5 villages, and each plenum would select a speaker to coordinate with the other villages.

Everyone in a plenum had the same right to speak, and every decision had to be reached unanimously.
The decisions were non-binding since there was no way to enforce them.
Sometimes it got frustrating when a delegate was clearly intoxicated or rambled incoherently and there was no one with authority to stop them speaking.
But in general, it worked really well as a tool to have everyone’s voice heard, inform everyone about news, and coordinate daily life, schedules, protest marches, and chores in the camp.

Until an outside threat appeared.
Police threatened to storm the camp and the plenum couldn’t reach a consensus to refrain from using molotov cocktails against them (in a tent city with children and disabled people sleeping inside).
The group advocating for violence (“black block”) stopped attending the meetings.
The remaining delegates split over the question whether the black block could be evicted from the camp, and most people stopped attending after that.

The police raid never happened.

I recommend https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-possibilities

Violence is in fact unique among forms of human action in that it holds out the possibility of affecting the actions of others about whom one understands nothing. Any other way one might wish to affect another’s actions, one must at least have some idea who they think they are, what they want, what they think is going on. Interpretation is required, and that requires a certain degree of imaginative identification. Hit someone over the head hard enough, all this becomes irrelevant. Obviously, two parties locked in an equal contest of violence would usually do well to get inside each other’s heads, but when access to violence becomes extremely unequal, the need vanishes. This is typically the case in situations of structural violence: of systemic inequality that is ultimately backed up by the threat of force. Structural violence always seems to create extremely lopsided structures of imagination.

As I understand anarchism, the idea is a society where human culture becomes powerful enough to overcome and replace this sort of violently imposed top-down structure.

My current understanding is, destruction of current system of government (violently or otherwise) followed by abolition of all law. Following this, small communities of like minded individuals form and cooperate to solve food, safety, water and shelter concerns.

I think your main mistake is to get this backwards; the mere destruction of government and law doesn’t by itself effect the formation of anarchism. You need a culture with enough utility and resilience to replace it and endure without falling back on the crutch of structural violence.

The book I linked goes into some detail considering what that might take, focusing on the example of the nearly-anarchist society of 1990 Madagascar, where technically they were under the rule of a formal government, but in practice almost all governance was independent from it and driven by their unique culture. To summarize a little from memory, ambitious people basically aspired to be liches, with living supporters conducting regular rituals involving their tombs and bodies to avoid getting cursed, because having a prominent place in a reputable tomb after death was the only path to be considered an important person. But the main way to get such a position was to provide for people enough that they would become able and socially obligated to maintain your place in the tomb. There’s clear social utility there; achievement materially depends on positive contribution.

If it is the case that the concepts and relationships that define society and how we behave are essentially feats of imagination, then it should be possible for this force of imagination to itself be the basis for holding things together, rather than forcing it into artificial molds defined by violent hierarchies. What’s needed for that to happen is to sufficiently develop cultural imagination as a technology that it can build systems that stand up to the pressures they need to bear, that currently get handled through destructive shortcuts that treat people as things.

Check out The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin. It’s an easy read, I had no trouble with it in high school. It doesn’t need to be violent at all. Very much a “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” kind of book. People focus a lot on “Why should that person have what I have, when I worked so hard?” when the real question is “Why should that person go without what all of us have, when it’s completely unnecessary?”

Anarchism is essential education, but highly impractical. It works on a fictional premise of good faith actors internally, while not maximizing power for threats externally. Because neither of these conditions are met, Anarchism remains relegated to ephemeral pop-ups and subsequent collapses. I wish it didn’t have to be so, it is a noble system.

I don’t know but there would probably be trains.

Not an anarchist, but the common thread among those I’ve talked to is the elimination of hierarchical structures (whether government or otherwise).

Other types of organization are fine, as long as there are no asymmetric institutional relationships.

True anarchy would not be possible until every human being on the planet is on the same page and doesn’t hate another for stupid reasons like what pronouns they want to be referred to by or what color their skin is, and also with zero absence of greed.

On the small scale, a co-op is basically anarchist. Nobody is really in charge, everyone pitches in. It works incredibly well small scale. The bigger the group, the more likely corruption will fuck everything up.

https://anarwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Anarchist_Societies

This might be of interest.

anarchism isn’t a system. it’s a guiding principle.

That’s about correct. You miss the final stage: rise of a group of leaders, who quickly manipulate the other members, take over power and (in the absence of law) create a dictatorship.