MemLeftOrg Dataset: Members of leftist organizations, 1848-2024
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Happy International Workers’ Day!
This blogpost briefly describes a dataset I’ve created, “Members of Socialist Organizations, 1848-2024”.
Members of Leftist Organizations, 1848-2024 (MemLeftOrg)
Is American socialism stronger today than under FDR?
The MemLeftOrg dataset can’t answer that question. But it can tell you whether there are more leftists organized today (about 80,000 socialists and 600,000 leftists) than in 1940 (about 75,000 communists and 300,000 leftists), which is a halfway decent proxy for socialist power.
MemLeftOrg attempts to estimate the number of leftists – “anarchists”, “revolutionary socialists”, “reformist socialists”, and “social democrats” – in the USA from 1848 (when radical republican revolutions spread across Europe and when non-utopian socialists began to create mass organizations) to 2024 (now).
As you can see from the mess below, this is not an easy problem. This period spans 176 years and ~250 notable organizations, some enormous and some tiny:
As of May 2024, MemLeftOrg includes about 2600 membership estimates (about 1400 of which useful) gathered from about 1100 sources. All estimates are sourced. Nearly all estimates includes a quote from the source text (and a page number or table name where appropriate). A minority of estimates (about 10%) are based on a mixture of direct estimates from sources and from chapter counts and tax filings. You can see these on the cited spreadsheet tabs.
That estimation type is more common in recent organizations. About 20% of the estimates for the 2000-2024 period, shown below, come from chapter counts and tax filings. For example, you can see that Our Revolution (OR) has 1 value per year, which is an estimate based on its nonprofit form 990 tax filings:
To my knowledge, MemLeftOrg is the first attempt to compile data of this type. This work took roughly 1.5 years. I am proud of this work. I am also sure that this work contains errors. It is still incomplete. I believe that MemLeftOrg includes all sizable leftist organizations with reliable membership estimates. If I am wrong, please do not hesitate to reach out! If you have suggested edits to MemLeftOrg, or a new source to add, send me a DM on Twitter (@socdoneleft) or Discord (@socdoneleft).
Ideally, MemLeftOrg would be paired with datasets of socialist electeds, socialist revenues, socialist unions, and socialist popular opinion. Unfortunately, those are also all very difficult to estimate.
Make your own graphs and download the data
You can easily make your own graphs with the MemLeftOrg data. Check out the web app below:
MemLeftOrg interactive graph maker on Shiny
To use the raw data, see the MemLeftOrg Google Sheet below:
Members of Leftist Organizations, 1848-2024
For more details on how to use the raw MemLeftOrg, see the “README” tab.
Please treat MemLeftOrg as CC-BY-NC-4.
Blogposts that use MemLeftOrg
DSA is the largest US socialist org in 109 years [2023 version]
You should join DSA. [2023 version]
Why “leftist” organizations?
I chose the label “leftist” instead of “socialist” for two reasons:
Socialist is a fuzzy term. Both nowadays or thenadays, it’s not always obvious where “reformist socialist” ends and “social democrat” begins. This dataset focuses on providing estimates, not litigating who is and is not a socialist.
Many organizations (like the Green Party) are a mixture of socialists, social democrats, and progressives. Rather than trying to figure out what proportion of Greens are Reds (an impossible task), I simply provide the estimate and allow the user to apply their own judgement.
I also chose the label “leftist” instead of “progressive”, for two reasons:
I want to measure leftist organizations, not progressive ones.
Leftist organizations usually grant voting rights to dues-paying members, a structure inherited from worker unions. Dues-paying, democratic membership is a more meaningful measure of mass political participation than mere donation to a cause. Few progressive organizations have this structure, and instead rely on unpaid volunteers and large donations. As a result, membership numbers for most progressive organizations are closer to “donor count” than “mass participants”. As always, this distinction is fuzzy and not universally true.
Shilling
Data work like this takes an enormous amount of time. If you want to see this dataset updated, please support my work:
Subscribe on Substack:
Solidarity Forever, Mike Alewitz, 2015