I’m all about a federated commune of communes, seriously, but at scale how is that really much different? You can’t have billions of people living on the planet, or hundreds of millions in a country, without some kind of coordination. It’s not practical for millions of people to vote on every little detail, you’ve still got to have focused representatives to, at minimum, collect information into policy that can be voted on in the first place.

Really the only two options, barring authoritarianism, are direct democracy or some kind of elected representatives. Direct democracy doesn’t really work for most considerable topics (agricultural production, electric grid installation, hospital equipment, etc.). Even if people knew enough about the subject to make informed decisions, most people won’t bother engaging. So we’re inevitably left with some kind of representative democracy, councils don’t really eliminate the fact of electing representatives, or the consequences when certain demographics over or underperform at the polls.