The clandestine abortion clinics and other self-help campaigns are precisely the kind of reformism I'm talking about. They undoubtedly make some people's lives more tolerable, and that's a fine thing if that's all you're interested in. That's the problem with ameliorative campaigns; they are not radical in that their organizers and promoters are not interested in getting at the root of the problem(s) and attacking them there, but are only interested in correcting humanist complaints.
The unchallenged shell is the framework of institutionalized hierarchy (in this case patriarchy) and the division of labor (in this case medical professionalization, part and parcel of another institutionalized hierarchy), which were untouched by the creation of clandestine abortion clinics; they just had to find some sympathetic doctors. That they were largely self-organized is to be acknowledged and lauded, but just because something is self-organized or self-managed is no reason to see in it the seeds of a genuinely anti-state, anti-capitalist revolution. So if we are going to measure the actual radical effects of something like a campaign to have safe abortions available to women who want them, then we need to find some anti-capitalist metric in it. Unfortunately for your example, I don't find one. In the absence of an official and legal medical procedure (which contains a bunch more assumptions about how the mainstream Euro-American medical industry functions to keep people separated from their own healing), the reclaiming of the ability of women to control their reproductive choices is a good thing, but again, there's nothing revolutionary about it.
Another shell that's rotten is industrialism.
I would say that in order for an organization or group to be anarchist it would need to have the following:
an explicit adherence to anarchist principles in terms of decision making and decision implementation (majority membership of anarchists not required);
explicit anarchist goals, namely the abolition of government, capitalism, and other institutions of hierarchy and domination (majority membership of anarchists not required).
If the organization maintains a principled adherence to prefigurative anti-politics and maintains a clear set of goals toward reaching an anarchic future, then I'd say that organization would qualify as anarchist. A majority membership of anarchists is irrelevant, since it's less interesting what they call themselves than what they're actually doing.
If you think the IWW has anything in common with left communism, then you'll have to explain what the hell you think left communism is and how the wobs embody it. You're the first person I've ever come across who makes such a wacky claim.
Yep there are anarchist critiques of anarchism, and I'm happy to include myself as one of the ones doing it. And why the defensiveness about whom you choose to work with? Nobody said anything about how you shouldn't have that capacity.
On big words: it is better for you to have to look up something than to force me to dumb down my vocabulary. I'm sorry you're not as familiar with certain words as I am, but that's not my responsibility.
