You just described a functioning state.
- laws (“Compliance is ultimately enforced by threat of exile,” “Even the death penalty is possible”)
- judiciary (presumably someone or some body of people is deciding punishment for law violations)
- legislature (“time-bound workgroups, time-bound appointees to specialized functions.” This likely extends to workgroups that decide on laws.)
- executives (someone or some body of people validates votes for this “democracy” and likely directs the formation and dissolution of workgroups)
Tell me how I’m wrong and that this is actually anarchy.
This is tough material, but I'll give it a try.
Firstly: in anarchism, a state is modeled as a social relation or collection of them. So it's not conceptualized as a "thing in itself" abstracted from the people that constitute it. A state is the people who participate in it, willingly or unwillingly. This is an idea from Gustav Landauer.
The implication is that by changing (social) relations, that is how a state transitions to a non-state, actual community. One distinction is that the group learns to do away with as much artificiality (and artifice) in their relations as possible; this is necessary because something with uncontrolled growth of artifice cannot become fully real.
Secondly there's the principle of mutual aid as described by Peter Kropotkin. This is what takes the place of such artifices and which becomes a conscious locus of interest to the entire community.
It really doesn't work to just match roles and then transplant all the negative connotations of a capitalist "representative" (spit) "democracy" to an outline of would-be anarchist societies because that's either a strawman or a method to invalidate to oneself that anarchism - non-archism - would be possible. It's a very informal and unrigorous kind of invalidation and quite uninteresting without at least making a sincere attempt to make some version of anarchism work in some respect.
One thing I remember hearing about a German commune was that they had a system of direct democracy which required all involved to come to an unanimous vote. Secondly it's a priority to any anarchist community to have their own means of production to the greatest extent possible, and taper off money in favor of trade or more actual mutual aid with similar communities.
Of course there's no requirement in anarchism to be less hierarchical than nature itself. Where the laws of nature dictate so one has no choice. This idea is more important in terms of iteration than in absolute terms, because understanding (e.g. practical grasp) of natural law improves naturally over time given minimally correct effort to do so.
Hope this clears some things up.
