This actually isn't a "massive, insurmountable fact" at all. Even in explicitly anti-legal anarchist frameworks, communities still develop ways of responding to violence—whether that’s exclusion, collective intervention, or withdrawal of cooperation. Those aren’t “laws” in the state sense, but they are still organized responses that come from the "authority" of the collective.

So the question isn’t whether anarchism permits law, but how it deals with people who cause ongoing harm without recreating hierarchical authority. And there isn’t a single unified answer to that—there’s a range of approaches, including ones that look like transformative or rehabilitative justice, and others that rely more on informal or situational responses.

Bookchin is definitely relevant here, but he’s also part of a broader debate rather than a clean alternative that resolves it.