but are never able to or incapable of doing so.

The Zapatistas have been capable for 30 years.

The sudden collapse of a state is not the ideal case for successful anarchist revolution, true. Pre-revolutionary Anarchism is like a fetus or a botfly larva, developing new functions and larger cooperatives over time while living inside a host. Growing more resilient until it is strong enough to survive without the host. If the host dies, wolves come to eat the host and the fetus/larva gets eaten too, but if the anarchist community grows strong enough to burst forth under its own power then it can resist other threats.

At that point they can still get bodied by something stronger or more powerful, but the same goes for every organism. Unfortunately for the past century the US has been going around the world murdering leftist movements like a housecat in a park with native bird species. When US hegemony collapses, the resulting power struggle could serve as a distraction for anarchist movements to burst forth and have no rulers above them, hopefully allowing them to grow strong enough to face whatever the new global power balance becomes.

That takes us outside the realm of anarchist historical examples, though a good analogy would be the anticolonial movements in Africa and south Asia that massively grew in power during WW1 and WW2, resulting in European nations having to decolonize afterward. Still, we can imagine anarchist communities continuing to grow to fill the available space and using their anarchic structures to be more productive and prosperous than capitalism or state communism (there's a lot of research showing that happier, unalienated people doing what they choose to be doing are way more productive than people being ordered to do something until they are exhausted).

Through their prosperity and shared creed, anarchist communities across the world can be in solidarity to defend themselves against whatever passes for a hegemon in the post-US world, as the people of nation-states see their prosperity and pursue anarchic reform or revolution in their own countries. And so the entire world could become anarchist.

Even in Anarchism there are different ideals on how it should be achieved. With those nuance differences that would eventually come to some immovable beliefs that would cause larger systems to develop to overpower differences.

Anarchism grows when people agree to work together towards a common goal. When there is disagreement on how to move forward, people negotiate and hopefully find a way to join forces. Between communities with different methodologies, this is called a federation. If disagreement builds, communities can defederate from one another, and people can switch community if they want. Or disagreement can shrink and communities can intermingle to the point you don't even notice which is which. Lemmy is an anarchic federation of admins (though the admins are unfortunately still the monarch of their servers).

So, given we are here talking on Lemmy across instances, clearly differences of opinion aren't enough to blow up an anarchic federation. Association is voluntary but we all want to communicate despite our differences, and we all want to defeat reddit. An anarchic federation emerging in a multipolar post-US world would have threats aplenty to keep them unified in the short term, and in the long term their growing strength gives them the luxury of defederating over minutiae if they really want to without their societies collapsing.

A lot of people don’t want to govern themselves or be involved in the complexity of making community decisions. They’d rather have someone else do that and eventually that someone else becomes a leader and that path leads to a hierarchy.

I don't want to clean the toilet either, but I'm gonna. Governance is a chore, and you don't get to skip out on your chores because you don't like it. And yes, charismatic leader-types exist, and it's the duty of every anarchist to get those people away from power and to have structures that prevent them from gaining power.

First off, don't accept a single-point-of-contact. Communities should always send at least two people as representatives to be taken seriously. Second, if they keep sending the same person, ask them to switch it up. Redundancy is healthy. Third, check up on them, and if their community is hierarchical, try to help them with that and don't entrust their representatives with important tasks. Thus the hierarchy doesn't spread and can hopefully be dissolved in time.

I think the age of simplicity that Anarchism brings is left in the past of our evolutionary progress of organized systems. Great idea, but proven it will never hold because it’s more of a transitional state that will eventually grow into complexity it’s principles can’t answer anymore.

Anarchism is more complex than hierarchy and more capable of handling complexity than hierarchy. The set of "simple rules" of anarchy are equivalent to hierarchy's one rule of "listen to the boss unless you can become the boss". Hierarchy is like trying to build an organism with only two kinds of base pairs, where anarchy has four. Anarchic structures are more complex, more flexible, more diverse, more capable of adapting to circumstances using the same volume of ideological payload.

Hierarchy has people out here living in western European-style housing in the tropics and impotently complaining about the heat. Hierarchy has people sleepwalking through life, permanently exhausted and unable to place or act on the staggering array of feelings they have because it doesn't serve the interests of those with power over them.

But in anarchy? Those feelings are used. Our social instincts aren't just reactivated, they are placed in a context where they do productive work. And like a human is more capable of throwing a rock at a target than doing the trajectory calculations for a thrown rock, so too are people more competent at local governance than at voting for a representative they've never met. People empathize with migrants face to face but can demonize what they see on TV.

Political issues that have plagued hierarchy for decades become solvable in hours when people are in the same room as those their decisions affect and left to make the choice for themselves. Little gets delegated to broader circles, so that by the time to former nation-state level governance, there is very little for representatives to do. People are just out there handling their own shit. Even globally relevant functions like the linux codebase or unit standardization can be staffed by the willing and adopted by the willing as they currently are, without intervention by a federal circle.