A curiosity

[MrDoom]

The cappie propaganda in schools and media always treats communism as if it were a dead, anachronistic ideology that has no modern supporters and has never evolved beyond Lenin and Stalin.

I wonder, though: just how many communists and anarchists are there in the world now anyways?

[Karl Marx's Camel]

Good question.

[which doctor]

It would be impossible to even make a decent estimation of how many there are.

[Karl Marx's Camel]

I don't think it neccesarily would be that hard, to estimate if we are talking about... hundreds of thousands, a few million, several hundred million, and so on.

[Okocim]

I can't even think how you'd go about doing that.
Sure, you've got all the members of various communist parties (which, in this country really doesn't amount to a lot), but then there's socialist parties - so you could possibly get a good estimate from that. But then there's all the underground parties and organizations as well as people who have no affiltration to any particular group.

I'd imagine in the tens of millions, but no real clue at all.

[RedCommieBear]

Let's count up the ones in the United States:
CP-USA: In 1998, a member stated the membership was around 50,000. Estimates range from 15,000 to 50,000.

Socialist Equality Party: 329+176+5+539+575+2+231 (Presidential votes)

Socialist Workers Party: 3,689+7102 (presidential election)

Workers World Party: 253 (presidential election)

Those were the only figures I could find. Then there are other factors you have to include. You have closet-communists who are afraid to be open about it. You have communists that work within other socialist organizations (I think there are some Marxists in the SP-USA), and there are even more because I couldn't find figures for all of them. So, in fact, this isn't a very good estimate.

(Edited for spelling)

[RedAnarchist]

http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html says that 1.1 billion people are either secular, non religious, atheist or agnostic, so i think we can expect most communists to come from this 1.1 billion.

They estimate that athiesm has around 200-240 million "adherenets", although these are mostly from post-Soviet countries and China.


Using this information and other facts found on this site, I would put the number of revolutionary socialists (including all forms of communism and anarchism) at around 50 million, although many of these may just be sympathisers or closet revolutionaries. I would estimate that most of these tend to be like the majority of revleft members - westerners. Most will probably consider themselves Marxists or Marxist-Leninist, followed by Trotskyism and Anarchism, although this is just estimates based on what the site says and what my own perception of the state of revolutionary socialism in the world is.