if I recall correctly, the Soviet councils were robbed of all authority by the bolsheviks.
Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level.
I'm just talking about ideas I've read about here, and things that seem worth trying - it's not like I've personally experienced an anarchist commune, especially one that has scaled beyond a single personal community. My main point of orientation is that the problems inherent to capitalism are pretty glaring (including, importantly, climate collapse through over-extraction, which will eventually cost us our biosphere) and alternatives need to be investigated. I'm well aware that self-organising systems are hard to build, systems theory and cybernetics are one of my main interests and they're all about self-organisation in nature and technology. But doing nothing is not an option. If I had a magic wand to implement any system I wanted I certainly wouldn't be so clumsy as to assume that something that "sounds reasonable" would work as I assume; experiments would have to be tried with many, many different models. Some experiments have and continue to be undertaken in communes and revolutionary communities around the globe, but nothing on the scale of a whole country outside of state socialism, which was just a red dictatorship. But at the end of the day, we really need to make the switch from competitive, exploitation-based coordination to cooperative coordination that can be more firmly rooted in human values.
"Doing nothing is not an option" is a very dangerous principle. Doing nothing is always an option worth considering and something that needs to be realistically compared about the proposed alternatives. The cure can easily be worse than the disease, and we have many historical examples of well-intended changes turning out more horrible than the problems they tried to fix. Quite often it happens that you are in (at least) a local optimum, and every change will be immediately worse in the short-term; and if you don't have a good reason to presume how exactly you'll get to an actually better scenario then simply "doing something" for the sake of doing something is outright evil and destructive and having good ill-informed intent is not a sufficient justification for harming people with the attempt to fix something. As the Hippocratic oath says, "first, do no harm" - it also isn't an absolute principle, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, but at the very least you have a very strong ethical responsibility to be sure that the outcome is really worth the harm.
The current system has many drawbacks, but it can easily be much worse, and most (all?) attempts of "tear everything down and rebuild" will be much worse at least for a non-trivial time - and there needs to be a very good, reliable argument the expected long-term result is really going to work in order to justify that certain harm in the face of uncertainty that there's going to be any improvement and quite some evidence that the long-term result often is not only not better, but clearly worse. "Doing nothing is not an option" is not an ethical justification if your "doing" harms someone, and making random radical changes to status quo without properly evaluating the realistically expected consequences (without wishful thinking and unrealistically optimistic assumptions) is simply irresponsible and unethical even if the current system has severe flaws.
To be clear, the "doing something" that you inferred (essentially, revolution/insurrection) is not what I was talking about. We need something better, but we need to find a way to get there first - so I think we're in agreement on that. I'm no fan of hasty action, and especially no fan of revolutionaries who would create rivers of blood over hypotheticals. But I do still believe that sitting complacently retaining the current capitalist order creates some pretty severe harm every day, and that it will lead to our collective ruin in the not-too-distant future. Therefore, it's imperative that we look for ways to fix that. Maybe all we ever do (and all we ever can do) is slap patches on the symptoms - but I'd like to think we can aim for better than that, given many of the symptoms are pretty bad and can't be readily patched.
Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level.
I'm just talking about ideas I've read about here, and things that seem worth trying - it's not like I've personally experienced an anarchist commune, especially one that has scaled beyond a single personal community. My main point of orientation is that the problems inherent to capitalism are pretty glaring (including, importantly, climate collapse through over-extraction, which will eventually cost us our biosphere) and alternatives need to be investigated. I'm well aware that self-organising systems are hard to build, systems theory and cybernetics are one of my main interests and they're all about self-organisation in nature and technology. But doing nothing is not an option. If I had a magic wand to implement any system I wanted I certainly wouldn't be so clumsy as to assume that something that "sounds reasonable" would work as I assume; experiments would have to be tried with many, many different models. Some experiments have and continue to be undertaken in communes and revolutionary communities around the globe, but nothing on the scale of a whole country outside of state socialism, which was just a red dictatorship. But at the end of the day, we really need to make the switch from competitive, exploitation-based coordination to cooperative coordination that can be more firmly rooted in human values.