“Anarchy” (literally, no-rule, or rule-by-none) is the shortest-possible-lived state of affairs: in a general population, once an overall rule by government is removed, myriads of local rulers will immediately emerge — rulers of one over another by who is stronger in any way and more willing to resort to coercion — from playground bullies to petty warlords.

All those abusive ex-boyfriends under restraining orders? An anarchy can’t and won’t enforce those — so guess who’ll be back?

Any armed yahoos in the neighborhood? Heck, any drug houses? You thought you might have trouble keeping your property before— consider it all “tax” to the new Capo. Yeah, that’s how fast the “anarchy” disappeared.

Totally ignorant comment about how anarchism actually works.

As I said just upthread, anarchists turn authority over to the people, themselves, in an organization based on community and worker self-management. It is self-governance from below, where no one is allowed to have autocratic authority over the people. People can be delegated (with mandates) to take on tasks on behalf of the community, but the delegation can be revoked and recalled at any time. Anyone who tried to impute authority to themselves would have to justify it to the collective assembly of the community.

The community assembly would have a militia to defend against any force that would try to impose authority from above. They would have layers of complex organization extending from the small local assembly to international federations, all answering to the people at the bottom.

There are examples of anarchism working. It is a highly organized social structure with safeguards in place to avoid the problems you have imagined would exist.

please cite specific instances where anarchy didn’t lead to warlords.

Please cite an anarchist society that factually did “lead” to warlords.

Somalia.

Closer to home in space if not in time, Bleeding Kansas before the Civil War, and most of Missouri during the War, where roving bands of partisans for both sides intimidated, extorted and murdered with impunity.

The Spanish anarchists’ inability to fend off foreign aggression, by itself, points out a fundamental weakness of an anarhcist society. Even if its internal workings were Utopian, it still could not resist a well organized assault by a ruthless authoritarian enemy.

You can of course use the “no TRUE Scotsman” dodge to avoid acknowledging that any of these fit your definition of TRUE anarchism, but then we’re back to arguing abiut hypothetical Utopias instaed of real societies.

No, Somalia is not really anarchist. Name any anarchist organization with any large influence in Somalia. You're applying not anarchism as a sociopolitical organization of socialism from below, but anarchy in the sense of chaos. These are not the same concepts.

As to the anarchists in Spain not being able to fend off a coalition of aggressive nations and forces that vastly outnumbered them, that’s just nonsensical as an argument, since a good social form of community organization does not magically make such a society omnipotent against massive forces brought against them.