The problem with the word "hierarchy" is that most people conflate very different concepts when talking about whether it is or isn't necessary. Anarchism doesn

The problem with the word "hierarchy" is that most people conflate very different concepts when talking about whether it is or isn't necessary. Anarchism doesn't say there should be nobody in charge, just that authority should be as limited as possible and only seen as temporary and conditional. Nation states centralise power. Even supposedly democratic nation states routinely follow policies the majority of their citizens disagrees with. Even disregarding the problems with first-past-the-post election systems, individual voters or even voter blocks have hardly any way to have their views represented or hold their representatives immediately accountable. Capitalism exacerbates this problem because it consolidates wealth and at scale (think billionaires, not millionaires) that wealth is equivalent to political power, allowing individuals and corporations to control politicians and thus policy, both by directly influencing individual politicians and by influencing public opinion to place "their" politicians in positions of power. Democratic Confederalism for instance embraces a communalist "free association" model of autonomous neighborhoods collaborating as communities and so on. Ultimately you still end up with federal super-structures but all power rests at the base rather than the top. The usual counter argument is "that is nice, but this can never work in practice" or "this can't scale" but in practice it does. Look into the Mondragon Corporation (a coop of currently ~75k workers) or the political structure of the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (Rojava). Another typical argument is that they don't look very different from the outside or are practically identical with the current systems if you squint really hard and tilt your head sideways: that is intentional. The differences become apparent when there are conflicts of interest or other times of crisis.