ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two aspects of early communist parties – namely, the weight they carried within the domestic balance of political power and their social composition. Sociological characteristics of members are important data for classifying early communist parties. Available data on the social composition of the members and voters – the number of studies on this issue is gradually increasing – suggest that communist parties especially attracted workers concerned with the immediate future and therefore interested in quick results. The organizational, political and psychological influences that determined the communist parties’ initial success appear to distort the issue. Each communist party represented a national ‘initial solution’ to certain problems facing segments of the working class, the peasantry and the intellectuals who sympathized with them. In countries where independent radical-socialist predecessors had existed before 1917–18 and had not yet expanded into larger organizations, the communist successors remained small during the founding moment.
