Professional revolutionaries

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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' revolution. The 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 vanguardism in general are to blame for the eventual totalitarian (what they term Stalinist) nature of the Soviet Union 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 Revolution 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 class 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 revolution. 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
• Leninism
• Professional Revolutionary a documentary about American Communist Saul Wellman.
• Vanguard party
• Vanguardism

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