Ad brands of capitalism - well OK, but any place that tried any brand of anarchism failed even harder than any brand of capitalism ever did, and the end result was much worse for the individual people who lived there. The US was always a heaven on Earth in comparison, even during its worst era of unregulated capitalism.
USSR is the largest example but it was a poor country. There were rich countries that voted for true communism democratically and even there it devolved into a catastrophe in less than a year (after WW2, or after a few years for the more recent examples). IMHO human nature makes it absolutely impossible to make communism work, because it will be immediately taken over by power hungry people for their own benefit. Any anarchism that might be desired will never be allowed to develop, these power hungry people will make sure they control it.
That is indeed the history in USSR/Spain for example, however i don't think it has to be this way. Many smaller-scale societies could be considered anarchist. In our 21st century, the only large-scale example i can think of is the zapatistas caracoles in Chiapas. Very interesting to read about if you're curious: millions of people living in autonomous communes without central government (although there's a central army to protect communities from the Nation State, it does not hold *any* political power). Money has not been abolished but its significance has been reduced due to collective work/property (cooperatives). Their judicial system is also very interesting, as it's based on reparations not punishment which appears to work great if you take murder/rape as a metrics which has almost entirely disappeared since the revolution in 1994.
I'm not saying the exact same model is applicable everywhere, but examples like this demonstrate that anarchism is possible on a wide scale. Although to be fair most zapatistas would not label themselves "anarchist", despite claiming to be from the anti-authoritarian/bottom left (the historical definition of anarchism).
At the other end, Native American tribes for example would capture people effectively taking slaves but they integrated them into their tribes. Similar practices where fairly widespread in many cultures without firm centralized governments. The captured wife/sex slave divide is historically nuanced. Keeping people under lock and key takes effort and limits the forms of manual labor they can do. Mines where often extremely horrific because they where so easily managed. Hunting on the other hand requires significant freedom of movement.
> widespread institutions run into real limits.
The only limit of European feudal lords was how many people they could kill/cause death before there was nobody left to do slave work and fight in wars for them. America was a heaven for the serfs.
They may have owed their lord specific quantities of uncompensated labor, but conversely that meant they had socially and legally protected free time.
Also, Serfdom largely disappeared in Western Europe well before America was a thing. “In England, the end of serfdom began with the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. It had largely died out in England by 1500 as a personal status and was fully ended when Elizabeth I freed the last remaining serfs in 1574” “ Serfdom was de facto ended in France by Philip IV, Louis X (1315), and Philip V (1318).[6][7] With the exception of a few isolated cases, serfdom had ceased to exist in France by the 15th century. In Early Modern France, French nobles nevertheless maintained a great number of seigneurial privileges over the free peasants that worked lands under their control. Serfdom was formally abolished in France in 1789.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_serfdom. Various exceptions did exist but it simply wasn’t that common in Western Europe.
That's not entirely wrong, but "criminal" is often used figuratively to refer to morally-abhorrent behavior. I took the liberty to employ the word this way to address the blind spots of our respective legal systems. I personally wouldn't call a weed smoker a criminal but would call a murderous cop a criminal: that France's legal system does not agree with me is unfortunate but irrelevant.
> Any other more socialist system was nothing else but much worse, and the social democracies of today have just the same issues
That's a debatable point of view, but my opinion is that what you refer to as "socialism" or "social democracy" is in fact just another brand of capitalism. For example, in anarchist circles, the USSR was widely criticized as "State capitalism" [0]. In this mental framework, laissez-faire capitalism (Randt/Hayek ideals) is yet another brand of capitalism, although it has yet to be proven that capitalism can exist without nation states to enforce it, while stateless communism has a varied history throughout the ages.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-i...