>
> Certainly many CP members fought in Spain, but I believe that a large
> number of the International Brigades were 'merely' radicals or
> anti-fascists, not CP organizers. You have, I presume, been in
> demonstrations organized by the party you once belonged to. Was not the
> proportion, even counting "rank & file party members as well as brnch
> organizers etc -- was not that proportion to demonctrators considerable?
> Same with those who went to Spain. Same with most of the PLA. Same with
> most who turned out for SDS rallies. There were, if I remember
> accurately, about 28 "Party Members" in LOngbow (the village in Hinton's
> _Fanshen_, and Longbow was a small village. BUT not more than 2 or 3 of
> those 28 really took any responsiblity for keeping the cell going,
> planning, etc...
========================== Doug's reference was to the party's "hardcore activists", which I understood to mean the party's militants, that intermediate layer of dedicated and active party doing sustained political work in the mass movements - as distinct from the local organizers and other party officials at all levels who constituted the party's full-time leadership and bureaucracy (who I think you and Doug have in mind) or the great mass of workers, intellectuals, farmers and others who intermittently followed the party's lead in their workplaces and communities and supported it politically. There can be no question the active militants, who I have always seen as the genuine "vanguard of the proletariat", numbered well beyond "20,000", assuming we are talking about the Comintern parties at the height of their influence from the Depression through the immediate postwar period.
Especially on a global level. In China, for example, the People's Liberation Army was 1.2 million strong in 1945. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_China#Membership). There were millions more Chinese workers and peasants supporting the CPC's underground activities during the Chinese civil war. Using your Longbow ratio above,even if the Chinese party's active and disciplined activists represented only 1 in 14 of those it armed and organized in the cities and rural areas, we are still talking about many hundreds, rather than tens, of thousands of "hardcore" CP activists in China alone. Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines, also had large Communist parties.
Nor, it seems to me, does the "20,000" figure do justice to the great number of CP activists who built the unions and other mass organizations in the advanced capitalist countries - probably not even to those who were hounded, jailed, and murdered for their efforts. It's not the case that the CP'ers constituted only a fraction of those who fought in the International Brigades. 80 to 90 percent of the German volunteers, up to 85 percent of the Latin Americans, 75 percent of the Poles and those from the Balkans, around 70 percent of the Americans, and 60 percent of the French volunteers are estimated to have been members of the Communist Party.(http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj84/durgan.htm) It would not surprise me if these percentages were also reflected in the composition of the anti-fascist resistance movements during World War II.
Of course, how can we really discuss the issue without knowing which parties, period, and personnel that Hobsbawn (if Doug's attibution is correct) was alluding to?