The concept of
professional revolutionaries, alternatively called
cadre, is in origin a Leninist concept used to describe a body of devoted communists who spend the majority of their time organising their party toward a mass revolutionary party capable of leading a
workers' revolutionA proletarian revolution is a social and/or political revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Proletarian revolutions are generally advocated by socialists particularly those of the communist variety....
. This size of this core is naturally proportional to the size of the party itself.
Most Marxists argue that a cadre is necessary in one form or another; Trotskyists in particular do not believe that these professional revolutionaries or
vanguardismIn the context of revolutionary struggle, vanguardism is a strategy whereby an organization attempts to place itself at the center of the movement, and steer it in a direction consistent with its ideology....
in general are to blame for the eventual totalitarian (what they term Stalinist) nature of the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
and its satellite states nor the situations in China, Cuba and other Communist states; instead they cite the eventual defeat and isolation of the
Russian RevolutionTheOctober Revolution , also known as the Soviet Revolution or Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution. It began with an armed insurrection in Petrograd traditionally dated to 25 October 1917 Julian calendar...
in the case of Russia, and the practices of Maoists and other so-called Marxist-Leninist parties as the true cause.
Discussion
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The concept of
professional revolutionaries, alternatively called
cadre, is in origin a Leninist concept used to describe a body of devoted communists who spend the majority of their time organising their party toward a mass revolutionary party capable of leading a
workers' revolutionA proletarian revolution is a social and/or political revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Proletarian revolutions are generally advocated by socialists particularly those of the communist variety....
. This size of this core is naturally proportional to the size of the party itself.
Political debates
Most Marxists argue that a cadre is necessary in one form or another; Trotskyists in particular do not believe that these professional revolutionaries or
vanguardismIn the context of revolutionary struggle, vanguardism is a strategy whereby an organization attempts to place itself at the center of the movement, and steer it in a direction consistent with its ideology....
in general are to blame for the eventual totalitarian (what they term Stalinist) nature of the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
and its satellite states nor the situations in China, Cuba and other Communist states; instead they cite the eventual defeat and isolation of the
Russian RevolutionTheOctober Revolution , also known as the Soviet Revolution or Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution. It began with an armed insurrection in Petrograd traditionally dated to 25 October 1917 Julian calendar...
in the case of Russia, and the practices of Maoists and other so-called Marxist-Leninist parties as the true cause. But other communists, particularly those sometimes dubbed "post-Maoists", do indeed disagree with the professional revolutionaries concept and view it as antithetical to the "mass party" (party physically composed of the masses of people rather than an elite intellectual core) ideal advocated especially strongly by Mao (though such a thing was never realised in China under his leadership). Such communists therefore today advocate for a current version of a "mass party" of
working classWorking class is a term used in academic sociology and in ordinary conversation to describe, depending on context and speaker, those employed in lower tier jobs as measured by skill, education, and compensation....
people, thereby in their view maximising direct participation in the revolution and the subsequent revolutionary government.
In Lenin's original work the purpose of the cadre is to educate the masses and essentially bring the entire population to the level of "professional revolutionaries", but it was not a requirement that the whole population, or even a majority, be at or near the "professional revolutionaries" level before seizing power in a
communist revolutionA communist revolution is a proletarian revolution inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism, typically with socialism as an intermediate stage...
. At its highest point of membership, in the 1980s, the CPSU contained only 18 million out of a total area population of 280 million, and it is unknown how thoroughly even a small fraction of those 18 million could have been called "professional revolutionaries" in the ideological sense.
See also
- Cadre
Cadre is the backbone of an organization, usually a political or military organization. The expression can be in the singular or the plural...
- Leninism
Leninism is the theory and practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a revolutionary vanguard party. Theoretically, Leninism comprises the political and economic communist theories of Vladimir Lenin, developed from Marxism, that were the establishing ideology of Soviet communism — in...
- Professional Revolutionary
Professional Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman is a documentary about the life of Saul Wellman.-Summary:“I want things to change, where the playing field is leveled,” Wellman says, “where equality emerges as a reality...where the horrible things about inequality are...
a documentary about American Communist Saul Wellman.
- Vanguard party
A vanguard party is a political party at the forefront of a mass action, movement, or revolution. The idea of a vanguard party was developed by Vladimir Lenin, most prominently in What is to be Done?, a political pamphlet first published in 1902....
- Vanguardism
In the context of revolutionary struggle, vanguardism is a strategy whereby an organization attempts to place itself at the center of the movement, and steer it in a direction consistent with its ideology....