You actually don't need leaders. I've been part of plenty of leaderless flat heirarchies that self organized pretty damned well. People just stepped up to do things that needed doing. The problem isn't that people can't function with out leaders. The issue is more that, those sorts of flat heirarchies don't tend to scale well.

But that doesn't necessarily mean they couldn't, if we put some effort and education into training people how to operate in them better. I'm less skeptical of the idea that we could operate in self organized non-heirarchies than I am of the idea that would could do away with the money and all formal organizations.

The idea that we could do everything by informal agreement just seems really unstable to me. Like you'd never quite know what the rules were and like they could change at any moment.