Are anarchists no longer pro democracy?

Some individualists are against all forms of mass organisation and collectivism, and therefore would reject democracy.

As socialists, I would argue the furthest we can go is a critique of democratism (fetishisation of democracy; democracy as the sole source of legitimacy; the view that socialism is radical democratisation of existing society), rather than a rejection of all forms of democracy.

Democratic methods of decision-making will necessarily and inevitably be incorporated in our movements and future society, but the ideology of democratism has been used (historically) to undermine class struggle and proletarian revolution (most notably during the Spanish revolution).

Reading list of communist critiques of democratism:

https://libcom.org/forums/theory/fuck-democracy-anti-democratic-reading-list-25012018

I am sympathetic to the "anti-democracy" anarchists though you have to divorce that with the individualists that reject all forms of organisation. Not knowing which reddit users you're referring to, and knowing how terrible those subreddits are for actual discussion, I don't want to presume too much of your or your friends experiences with them.

However the contemporary anarchist tendency of framing anarchism as the best kind of democracy, or the most direct democracy, or whatever, is comparatively recent. Anarchist texts from the late 1800s to early 1900s rarely talk about democracy positively, even in this specific sense. Émile Pouget's "Direct Action" has a whole section about how awful democracy and "democratism" is, and Ricardo Mella has an entire book called "Law of Numbers" criticising it.

The interesting thing is that both of these anarchists were also syndicalists, and Pouget himself was elected to a number of positions of responsibility in the movement. So what's the catch, were they just hypocrites? I'd say no, I think the only way it can seem like that is if you misunderstand what they're saying. Malatesta was succinct about how he understood democracy:

Even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force… Therefore, those who really want ‘government of the people’ in the sense that each can assert his or her own will, ideas and needs, must ensure that no one, majority or minority, can rule over others; in other words, they must abolish government, meaning any coercive organisation, and replace it with the free organisation of those with common interests and aims.

In other words – it's not the precise mechanism of voting that people disagree with, but more like the question of enforcement: does the majority have the right to rule over the minority? This is abstract, but in practical terms anarchist organisations have been trying to wrangle with it since forever. Should majority decisions be binding on members who disagree? Should a majority of branches dictate what another branch does? How do we arrange voting, do we do it where each branch sends a delegate who votes on their instructions, or do we do a vote where the whole organisation is like one constituency?

C4SS hosted a debate about this a few years ago. Most of the contributions aren't worth reading, but the debate between Wayne Price and Shawn Wilbur covers some of these ideas.

When talking about anarchy I tend not to frame it in terms of democracy; I just think "democracy" at this point is a meaningless word that doesn't explain very much, and that appeals to it are often misinterpreted. Democracy is at once both individualist (in that the basic unit is the individual voter as like an atom, instead of any organic collectivity) and collectivist (in that "the people" becomes an alienated version of the actual populace, that rules over them anyway). I think a break with contemporary political mores should be emphasised, which necessitates a critique of democracy along the lines of what craftwork says. With that said, I think fussing over the semantics is pointless and it's best to look at the substance of what people are saying.

I don't see the picket line example as relevant. Perhaps a more relevant one would be that Pouget talked about, when he talked about how "the majority" can hold back militant minorities. Should a minority of workers in a workplace wait until they have a majority of supporters before taking action? Or should they go ahead and do it anyway, once they're certain they'll succeed? This isn't an abstract debate either (like the anarcho-individualist trying to cross a picket line) but one that actually comes up often in modern labour law, where union bargaining, strikes etc are illegal unless they are voted for by a majority of the workers in a workplace.

Sure, but "the right to influence decisions that affect them" is the kind of thing I mean when I say the word "democracy" is mostly just meaningless these days. Even fascists might hypothetically agree with that, or Stalinists – the CPC currently has "consultative democracy" as a big part of its ideology. Of course we can specify what we mean by "influence" or "everyone" or what the definition of "decision that affects them" is, but at that point, we're better off just talking about the technical aspects anyway.

When we're talking about internal organisational structure, I completely agree that it's best to be experimental, adopt a variety of things and adapt to different organisational purposes. But, I do think the critiques of democracy by anarchists are valuable, and should be fed back into our thinking on organisation structure. A question about whether an anarchist organisation should, for instance, have majority votes that bind on minorities, is one that is hard to answer without looking back to our theory on the matter.

I did like the old (post-split, UK) Wildcat who were ultra-left anti-democratic communists. If I remember rightly their argument was that revolutionary minorities should get on with revolutionary activity without worrying about some democratic mandate. This might have been influenced by the miners' strike as there was some controversy over whether a vote should have been taken for the strike.

It's hard to be sympathetic to those 'anti democracy' anarchists who argue that direct democracy is a form of state or government. I'm curious to know what is their definition of a state. They're basically saying only consensus is a feasible form of decision making.

Yeah, it's one of those arguments I don't find particularly interesting because a lot of it feels like people going "I define this term in this particular way and therefore it's good" vs "I define this term in this particular way and therefore it's bad". If anyone is interested in getting into it, I think Crimethinc have the most developed and explicit critique of democracy, including direct democracy, that I've seen:
https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/29/feature-from-democracy-to-freedom
https://crimethinc.com/2016/03/16/series-the-anarchist-critique-of-democracy

Or if you want someone with more impeccable anarchist communist/libcom credentials, there's these from Malatesta:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-neither-democrats-nor-dictators-anarchists
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-democracy-and-anarchy