Do “anarchists” hear themselves? I don’t know if OP is an anarchist, but this is why I don’t take them seriously. Their ‘ideal society’ always leads back to what is—in its most fundamental form—a government.

Not really (I’m not an anarchist, if that matters)

A government is an institution created to hold power between people and to act on their behalf (executive power) it is also a regulatory system (law, rules justice… the legislative and judiciary powers). That would be common with most ‘local’ entities. Albeit at a much smaller scale. More on that important nuance next.

A government is also an autonomous organism, a thing in itself, autonomous, with its own objectives. An administration or multiple ones, offices, bureaus, services, departments. It also a lot of people working for it. Things that are not found in local/smaller orgs. It’s so autonomous that it tends to grow beyond its original limits when left uncontrolled . It grows in order to sustain itself and in order to weakens/get rid of whatever it considers a threat to its own existence (any other form of power, say local vs national or federal). It will grow as much as it can even at the cost of the interest of the very people who devised it to begin with.

That’s why most democracies were supposed to have devised safe-guards against such excess. But the threat is always there. Suffice to watch the present US government to realize it doesn’t work as it should: the US executive is eating away the very fabric of country ‘democratic’ roots and values, and getting rid of all safe-guards by all means (corruption, threats,…). BTW, something remotely similar but less dramatic and much slower is happening in the EU: we’re witnessing a lot less democratic control happening, in exchange for a lot more bureaucratic control (even against ourselves and our own will, us the citizen).

Such a derive would hardly be possible with a local for of power (aka limited and surrounded by many other powers like it). A,d individuals in each one of those power would still weight enough to keep it under control (by sheer egoism) and even if, for some really odd reason, all individuals in one of such power would agree to abuse it at the exact same time and to go in the exact same direction (which would already be very impressive, in itself) all other powers existing around that one would suffice to put it (and its too confident members) back in its place, if not effortlessly at least it would be done.

As I understand it, the anarchist idea of small/local powers lies in the co-existence of many of them that would be as different and autonomous from one another as possible. Which is kinda neat but it’s also something that not many in the wide anarchist spectrum (from the far left to the most right extremists, so to speak) seem to be willing to accept. I mean, they’re all fine with the theoretical idea of having many independent smaller groups co-existing one next to the others but most of them only seem willing to tolerate the existence of like minded other groups… which, to me, is the main reason why I can’t imagine anarchism getting that far ever: they too want the world to be a perfect image of themselves. Which makes them behave very much like any of the more traditional/structured form of organizations.