You can mark you interesting snippets of text that will be available through a unique link in your browser.


Professional revolutionaries

Professional revolutionaries

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 great majority of their time organizing their party toward proletarian revolution. This core is usually very small, and as a consequence is sometimes cited for being the cause of the return to capitalism of the so-called 'Communist states'. Most Marxists argue that a cadre core is necessary in one form or another. Trotskyists do not believe that professional revolutionaries or vanguardism are to blame from the eventual totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union, its satellite states, and the People's Republic of China. Instead they cite Stalinism as the cause, coupled with an unprepared proletariat. 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".

Basing themselves on What is to be Done?, the pamphlet that bore the idea, Trotskyists and other communists today advocate for a "mass party" with a membership of millions of working class people, thereby maximizing, in their view, direct participation in the revolution and the subsequent revolutionary government.

ee also

*Cadre
*Professional Revolutionary a documentary about American Communist Saul Wellman.
*Vanguard party
*Vanguardism


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

  
Share  

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Felons and Revolutionaries — Studio album by Dope Released September 14, 1999 Recorded …   Wikipedia

  • Russia — /rush euh/, n. 1. Also called Russian Empire. Russian, Rossiya. a former empire in E Europe and N and W Asia: overthrown by the Russian Revolution 1917. Cap.: St. Petersburg (1703 1917). 2. See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 3. See Russian… …   Universalium

  • china — /chuy neuh/, n. 1. a translucent ceramic material, biscuit fired at a high temperature, its glaze fired at a low temperature. 2. any porcelain ware. 3. plates, cups, saucers, etc., collectively. 4. figurines made of porcelain or ceramic material …   Universalium

  • China — /chuy neuh/, n. 1. People s Republic of, a country in E Asia. 1,221,591,778; 3,691,502 sq. mi. (9,560,990 sq. km). Cap.: Beijing. 2. Republic of. Also called Nationalist China. a republic consisting mainly of the island of Taiwan off the SE coast …   Universalium

  • France — /frans, frahns/; Fr. /frddahonns/, n. 1. Anatole /ann nann tawl /, (Jacques Anatole Thibault), 1844 1924, French novelist and essayist: Nobel prize 1921. 2. a republic in W Europe. 58,470,421; 212,736 sq. mi. (550,985 sq. km). Cap.: Paris. 3.… …   Universalium

  • Vladimir Lenin — Lenin redirects here. For other uses, see Lenin (disambiguation). Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Владимир Ильич Ленин …   Wikipedia

  • Germany — /jerr meuh nee/, n. a republic in central Europe: after World War II divided into four zones, British, French, U.S., and Soviet, and in 1949 into East Germany and West Germany; East and West Germany were reunited in 1990. 84,068,216; 137,852 sq.… …   Universalium

  • Europe, history of — Introduction       history of European peoples and cultures from prehistoric times to the present. Europe is a more ambiguous term than most geographic expressions. Its etymology is doubtful, as is the physical extent of the area it designates.… …   Universalium

  • Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — a former federal union of 15 constituent republics, in E Europe and W and N Asia, comprising the larger part of the former Russian Empire: dissolved in December 1991. 8,650,069 sq. mi. (22,402,200 sq. km). Cap.: Moscow. Also called Russia, Soviet …   Universalium

  • American Revolutionary War — Infobox Military Conflict conflict=American Revolutionary War caption=Clockwise from top left: Battle of Bunker Hill, Death of Montgomery at Quebec, Battle of Cowpens, Moonlight Battle date=1775–1783 place=Eastern Seabord, Central Canada, Hudson… …   Wikipedia