Left in numbers

[punisa]

Would someone be willing to give an estimate on a potential number of leftists in the world today?
Anyone studied statistical forecasts and such in college? I did, but havent payed much attention to it unfortunately :blushing:

I guess there is no actual data on this anywhere, so we can feel free to guess.
But if perhaps there is some public survey please share (I googled it and couldn't find anything).

How about the number of active members here on Revleft?
How do we stand against "competition" such as stormfront? I fear they have many more members.

We all remember that strange study which claimed that many young people in US would prefer socialism over capitalism. But I believe the numbers are high because not all really know (unfortunately) what socialism is.

How about among our ranks?
For example - are there more anarchists then communists?

We could explore the number of members from various parties, but I think that the total number is much greater - if we count all of us who are not affiliated with either party.

Anyway, I was thinking that some sort of data could really come in handy.

[which doctor]

How do you define leftist?

[punisa]

How do you define leftist?
On a large scale categorization I'd say socialists, anarchists and communists, stopping at social democrats (excluding them).
That is my humble definition.

[ZombieGrits]

leftist, for our purposes = communists, socialists (of the non-reformist variety), anarchists (of the non-capitalist variety), radical syndicalists, etc.

EDIT: exactly what Punisa said, sorry to repeat stuff

[Outinleftfield]

Openly not many.

How many closet and even self-repressed leftists are there? People lie about their true beliefs to fit in all the time. We need to make more of a presence and be more visible if we're going to get more people speaking out. I bet many of us on here are not leftists in our public lives. I am.
Everyone should bring up left-wing issues every chance they get and spend some time commenting on mainstream news forums like topix. If people see we are here they will speak up too.

[Tablo]

I also think many who are politically apathetic would be strongly sympathetic to the Left.

[red cat]

On a large scale categorization I'd say socialists, anarchists and communists, stopping at social democrats (excluding them).
That is my humble definition.

How many full-timers worldwide should make you feel confident about our growing strength ?

[CartCollector]

Well, Maoists were recently able to take over Nepal. So I would guess that in some areas there's quite a few radical leftists.

[¿Que?]

While I can't provide actual statistical data myself, I can point you in the right direction. I will say this, though. A big problem with most of the data out there is how they word their questions. For example, check this question out from the General Social Survey, one of the main data sets that people use in sociology (You have to go to "P" then "Political" then "Political Ideology"):
http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website/Browse+GSS+Variables/Subject+Index/
See the problem? One is supposed to rate themselves on a continuum from extremely liberal to extremely conservative, whereas most radical/revolutionary leftists would not consider themselves liberal or conservative. Therefore, all their answers would fall into the NAP, DK, or NA categories. I forget what NAP stands for, but the other two are Don't know and not applicable.

You can surf around the GSS website for other questions. They have some about people's opinion of communism and about civil liberties for socialists. There might be other questions, but I don't think any of them will answer your question specifically. You may also want to check out the ICPSR website, which is a searchable database of numerous data sets including the GSS. You can search by keyword. I found many of the data sets that even reference socialism or communism tend to be news polls, so that's something to consider.

If you find something interesting, please let me know (shoot me an IM or something). I am actually trying to reproduce the Rassmussen poll you mentioned with other existing data sets, and do some cross analysis with other variables such as gender, race, socio-economic status and anything else I come up with that may be relevant. If you want, I also have access to SPSS, which is a statistical software package, which I can use to create charts and graphs of the data, since a lot of that data is in raw format, and difficult to analyze without some kind of software.

Anyway, good luck. Like I said, if you find something, let me know. You might be helping me out.

[AK]

I also think many who are politically apathetic would be strongly sympathetic to the Left.
Keep in mind that many apathetics have nationalistic tendencies - which makes them political in the way that they would support the party or government that supposedly is on the side of their nation. Also, many who are politically apathetic just readily accept and agree with their government and state's policies, laws and actions. These are the people we hope to change, see.

[Q]

A complicating factor is that most far left organisations treat their membership figures like state secrets, inflate the figures or do both.

[Rusty Shackleford]

i would not doubt that somewhere around 5-10% of the population are leftists.

[Q]

A complicating factor is that most far left organisations treat their membership figures like state secrets, inflate the figures or do both.

What I should add here is that membership numbers don't give the whole picture. An English comrade once told me that the UK alone had probably up to half a million people that have been a member of one of the 57 varieties of communist organisation at some point in their life and most of them still identify themselves as socialist or communist. Yet these people are completely disillusioned with the sectarian state of the left, so the actual current membership figures of the far left organisations combined is just around 10 000 (in the UK).

It's both very depressing to see how hard we fail, yet it also gives a sense of huge opportunity if we just manage to get over ourselves and organise on a non-sectarian, all-class basis.