Anarchists generally criticize representative democracy, not democracy in general. Makno's own experiments in the territory that his forces controlled were basically a form of very distributed and localized council democracy.
Having read the proposals he made after his defeat, his "Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists" [1] I disagree. He just talks about democracy, indeed talking mostly about representative democracy, but the system he proposes has no voting of any sort.
Actually, reading it reminded me of another such book I had read a while ago. Qaddafi's Green Book, where he lays down his ideal system, the Jamahiriya.
On paper, it is pretty cool: every matters of state are decided by local assemblies that can call for a higher level assembly when deemed necessary. But devil is in the detail. The Guide has a final say, in a bit of an unspecified way, exactly how Maknho stays pretty vague on the whole decision process.
I am sure that if Qaddafi had been defeated in his youth, many anarchists would be musing about this system in the way we do Makhno's.
Note that I was referring to the actual practices in the Free Territory, not Makhno's theorizing. The local councils did run things in most communities.
Qaddafi's green book is just a rehash of the council democracy. But yes, it can certainly be implemented differently - just as you can have a multi-party representative democracy on paper that is a totalitarian dictatorship in practice, as in e.g. DPRK.
I think better examples of functional democracy along these lines can be seen in the Zapatista-controlled areas in Mexico, and especially in Rojava/AANES. Rojava is interesting because they have an actual written social contract that captures the details of the electoral system, which is not very typical for such forms of governance: https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...
