Cadrisation: building a party of organic intellectuals

In traditional military parlance, the cadre referred to the nucleus of officers around which a unit of soldiers could be built.1 Like many military terms, it would be adopted by revolutionaries in the inter-war period: cadres were the core of activists of a party, promoting their organisations’ ideas and providing leadership and direction within the class war.2

The question of “cadrisation”, of forging cadres out of people who gravitate towards revolutionary politics, is fundamental for anyone who believes political organisation is necessary to overthrow capitalism and make possible a socialist society.3 Although the numerical growth of a revolutionary organisation through recruitment is important, it is unlikely that such an organisation will grow beyond a propaganda sect unless it has a core of members able both to articulate revolutionary ideas clearly and lead struggles. Moreover, because full-throated revolutionary ideas are, outside of revolutionary situations, the property of a minority, and in tension with the dominant ideas in society, this core must be confident enough in its conception of the world to resist considerable societal pressure to conform.

Such a cadre does not develop spontaneously. It is true that conditions marked by a high level of class struggle can accelerate and lubricate the process. Yet, even then, it is far from automatic that practical experience of struggle alone develops the rounded revolutionaries required to build an organisation in the long run. Specific struggles ebb or go down to defeat; new problems and issues arise, challenging socialists to develop their theory, present new explanations and rethink their tactics. Beyond a certain point, even the best militants must find ways to systematically theorise their activity using the tools of Marxism and, where necessary, refine those tools. This involves not simply a relationship in which new members are nurtured by those with more experience but the development of a culture in which every member is part of an ongoing process to develop their theory and their practice and to unify the two.

Not only is cadrisation far from automatic; it cannot be conceived as a mechanical operation. A ten-meeting educational course, however valuable, will not cause cadre to roll off the production line, like cans of beans from a cannery. Instead, cadrisation involves conscious effort across multiple fields of activity, attention to detail and a theoretical understanding of the nature of revolutionary parties.

The Bolshevik legacy

It is helpful to start with the conception of cadrisation within Lenin’s Bolsheviks.4 The Bolsheviks remain the only organisation in history to have led workers, alongside other oppressed groups, to victory in a socialist revolution on a national scale. Even if that revolution could not survive its reverses under Stalin, it remains a signal achievement. That does not mean that the parties we create today will replicate Bolshevism or face identical concrete issues—we are not engaged in an exercise in historical re-enactment. Nonetheless, some of the general problems addressed by Bolshevism are not specific to the society in which they arose but are instead rooted in the social relations of capitalism and the conditions of workers living and fighting under that system. These include the uneven consciousness of the working class, the potential for confrontation with a highly centralised capitalist state, the need to fight for reforms without succumbing to reformism, and the relationship between workers’ exploitation and wider forms of oppression.5

Essential to Lenin’s approach is the notion that the party is not, outside revolutionary insurrections, the organisation of the working class as a whole; nor should it reflect the typical or average consciousness of workers. Rather, it is the organisation of the most advanced workers, those who have broken with capitalist conceptions of the world, who want to overthrow that system. By fusing together such workers, the party can intervene more effectively in struggles, strengthening working-class combativity and confidence, while implanting more deeply revolutionary conceptions of the world and drawing further layers of workers into the organisation. In a revolutionary situation, the pool of “advanced” workers can grow into an ocean, allowing the party to focus the energies and power of the mass of workers to confront the capitalist state, breaking it and replacing it with democratic organs of working-class rule. Such a party can draw on and develop a body of theory starting from Karl Marx’s understanding of capitalism, an understanding rooted in the potential for working-class self-emancipation that seeks to concentrate and apply the historical lessons of workers’ struggles.6

This brief statement of the relationship between party and class should not imply a straightforward mechanical interaction between them. One price paid for the Stalinist counterrevolution in the late 1920s was the fabrication of a myth of a monolithic “Leninism”, marching the workers towards their inevitable victory.7 The reality was quite different.

The worker-Bolsheviks of 1917

When revolution arrived in Russia in February 1917, most of the leading Marxists remained exiled abroad.8 Much of the local Bolshevik leadership in the capital, Petrograd, was under arrest, and the senior leaders who remained at liberty were paralysed by the sudden eruption of revolt.9 Yet, the uprising was not spontaneous in the pure sense of being utterly leaderless: a substantial layer of worker militants, often steeled through some form of revolutionary socialist training, provided direction on the ground.10 Working-class Bolshevik cadres were among those who played a role in encouraging the fracturing of the state machine, allowing the overthrow of the Tsarist dictatorship.11 Leon Trotsky gives an instance of this in his History of the Russian Revolution:

A worker-Bolshevik, Kayurov, one of the authentic leaders in those days, relates how at one place, within sight of a detachment of Cossacks, the demonstrators scattered under the whips of the mounted police… Kayurov, and several workers with him…took off their caps and approached the Cossacks with the words: “Brothers—Cossacks, help the workers in their struggle for their peaceable demands; you see how the Pharaohs [the Tsarist police] treat us, hungry workers. Help us!” This consciously humble manner, those caps in their hands—what an accurate psychological calculation! Inimitable gesture! The whole history of street fights and revolutionary victories swarms with such improvisations… And a few minutes later…the crowd were tossing in their arms a Cossack who before their eyes had slaughtered a police officer with his sabre.12

Figures such as Kayurov, a worker in the Erikson factory in Petrograd and a Bolshevik since the birth of the organisation in 1903, were “in day-to-day control of the revolution in the streets”.13 Trotsky answers his rhetorical question—“who led the February revolution?”—with the reply: “Conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.” This education rested on a grasp of the “methods of Marxism”, an understanding “ever nourishing itself on the living experience of the masses”, including the lessons of the earlier 1905 Revolution.14 While this was no guarantee of victory, without Bolshevism, the consummation of the revolution in October 1917, with the dispersal of the Provisional Government that emerged after February, and its replacement with a Soviet democracy built from below by the struggles of workers and the oppressed, would have been impossible. Yet this was a victory led by a living tradition, in which Lenin, along with Trotsky who would join the Bolsheviks in 1917, were in constant creative dialogue with workers leading the revolutionary process.

In the years running up to 1917, Lenin would repeatedly stress the need for the Bolsheviks to be a centralised organisation, able to act cohesively to lead workers’ struggles. This was essential to the triumph of October 1917, by which time the Bolsheviks had achieved a decisive weight in key industrial centres, as well as winning the majority support in the key city of Petrograd.15 Yet, the Stalinist caricature of an efficient, monolithic machine was wildly exaggerated. The reality was of a poorly funded and understaffed party apparatus, periodic bouts of repression that disrupted the organisation, combined in 1917 with a massive influx of relatively raw recruits, not to mention intense, sometimes chaotic, debate.16 Crucially, this included Lenin having, in the heat of revolution, to break his own organisation from its previous orthodoxy: that the revolution would limit itself to “democratic” tasks, rather than progressing to a social revolution against capitalism.17 As Trotsky would later argue, Lenin was able to conduct this fight successfully because:

He represented not so much the party machine as the vanguard of the proletariat. He was…convinced that thousands [of] workers…would now support him. The masses at [that] moment were more revolutionary than the party, and the party more revolutionary than its machine… Lenin exerted influence not so much as an individual but because he embodied the influence of the class on the party and of the party on its machine.18

Lenin, though, was one individual. Had he not had a substantial number of Bolshevik cadres able to grasp his argument, measure it against the intent and militancy of the workers to whom they related, and respond to it, the moment would have been lost. As Tony Cliff argues, despite the enormous flux and instability, “the fact that…the party survived with all the vigour it did was due to its deep roots in the class, to its being a real mass workers’ party… For a party working under illegal conditions, in a country where the industrial proletariat numbered only some 2.5 million, a cadre organisation of several thousands surviving for many years is a remarkable achievement”.19 As Trotsky notes, while parties can grow quickly during a revolutionary upsurge, “the process of educating the cadres requires a considerable period of time and the revolution does not afford this time”.20 Creating a party is not substitute for the self-activity of the masses, but without the prior creation of a party of cadre, no revolution is likely to succeed in displacing reformist conceptions or confronting and breaking the capitalist state.

The cadre in its context

Lenin writes repeatedly in the run-up to 1917 about the problem of developing a cadre. One challenge in reading these writings is differentiating the specific from the general. Almost everything Lenin wrote was polemical, reflecting specific discussions taking place within the socialist movement. A few examples will illustrate this.

Prior to the 1905 revolution, Lenin’s emphasis in works such as What is to be Done? is on constructing a cohesive network of “professional revolutionaries”, bound together by a national newspaper, and able avoid the amateurishness that had allowed police repression to undermine earlier efforts. The revolutionaries, Lenin insisted, had to go beyond relating to the narrow economic battles among workers, what he described as economism, taking up wider political issues of oppression with which the most militant Russian workers were already starting to concern themselves.21 Lenin linked this to the need for clear theory: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity”.22 He goes on:

A person who is…shaky on questions of theory, who has a narrow outlook, who pleads the spontaneity of the masses as an excuse for his own sluggishness, who resembles a trade-union secretary more than a [spokesperson] of the people, who is unable to conceive of a broad and bold plan that would command the respect even of opponents, and who is inexperienced and clumsy in his own professional art—the art of combating the political police—such a man is not a revolutionary, but a wretched amateur!23

The Lenin of this period is often charged with attempting to form a party out of the intelligentsia, drawing on groups such as students, and ignoring the initiative of workers themselves. The reality is quite different. For one thing, his proposed organisation of revolutionaries was to stand at the centre of a much wider network of workers who would be the dynamic motive force in the struggle.24 Moreover, he was clear on the necessity to recruit his professional revolutionaries from among the ranks of workers.25 He was scathing of any condescension towards workers on this score:

[O]ur very first and most pressing duty is to help to train working-class revolutionaries who will be on the same level in regard to party activity as the revolutionaries from amongst the intellectuals… Attention, therefore, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the “working masses” as the Economists [ie followers of economism] wish to do, or to the level of the “average worker”… [W]e are backward, because we do not recognise our duty to assist every capable worker to become a professional agitator, organiser, propagandist, literature distributor, etc, etc… [T]ry to place every capable working man in conditions that will enable him to develop and apply his abilities to the fullest: he is made a professional agitator, he is encouraged to widen the field of his activity, to spread it from one factory to the whole of the industry, from a single locality to the whole country. He acquires experience and dexterity in his profession; he broadens his outlook and increases his knowledge; he observes at close quarters the prominent political leaders from other localities and of other parties; he strives to rise to their level and combine in himself the knowledge of the working-class environment and the freshness of socialist convictions with professional skill, without which the proletariat cannot wage a stubborn struggle against its excellently trained enemies.26

Lenin would prove successful in creating a network based on his Bolshevik “committeemen”—revolutionaries of impeccable character and heroism, who organised secret meetings, agitated among workers, coordinated street demonstrations and often faced periods of imprisonment or deportation. However, with the eruption of revolution in 1905, many of these committeemen, steeled in the methods of the earlier phase of struggle, lagged behind the newly awoken masses. Lenin now sought to draw the most advanced elements of the working class into the organisation, to help overcome any internal conservatism. The time for conspiratorial methods and secrecy had passed:

[W]e must considerably increase the membership of all party…organisations…to be able to keep up to some extent with the stream of popular revolutionary energy… This…does not mean that consistent training and systematic instruction in the Marxist truths are to be left in the shade… We must remember that our “doctrinaire” faithfulness to Marxism is now being reinforced by the march of revolutionary events, which is everywhere furnishing object lessons to the masses… Hence, we do not speak about…relaxing our distrustful and suspicious attitude towards the woolly intellectuals and the arid-minded revolutionaries. Quite the contrary… We speak of the importance for our day of using the object lessons of the great revolutionary events…to convey—not to study circles, as in the past, but to the masses—our old, “dogmatic” lessons…27

Lenin’s confidence that Bolshevism would no simply be submerged in an influx of newly radicalised workers was rooted in a conviction that the revolution proved the correctness of Bolshevik theory, embedded in the organisation, that workers would “act, and transform drab theory into living reality”.28 The best of the existing cadre, through argument, experience and the pressure of the masses, could be won to the new perspective.

By 1908, in the face of successful counter-revolution, there was a drift away from socialist politics. Lenin notes that, while members of the intelligentsia for whom Marxism had been fashionable in the heady days of revolt were leaving in droves, important sections of the working class remained: “The Party has…entered the straight road of leadership of the working masses by advanced ‘intellectuals’ drawn from the ranks of the workers themselves”.29 Later that year, he argued:

The revolution raised up to political life such deep-lying sections of the people, it often brought out on to the surface so many casuals, so many “knights for a day”, so many newcomers, that it was quite inevitable that very many of them should lack any kind of integrated outlook on the world. Such an outlook cannot be shaped in…a few months of feverish activity… Therefore, a new sorting-out among the new social layers, the new groups, the new revolutionaries awakened by the revolution is quite inevitable…

In the interests of this new sorting-out a strengthening of theoretical work is essential. The “present moment” in Russia is precisely one in which the theoretical work of Marxism, its deepening and expansion, are dictated not by the state of mind of this or that individual, not by the enthusiasm of one or another group, and not even by the external police conditions which have condemned many to elimination from “practical work”—but by the whole objective state of affairs in the country. When the masses are digesting a new and exceptionally rich experience of direct revolutionary struggle, the theoretical struggle for a revolutionary outlook, ie, for revolutionary Marxism, becomes the watchword of the day.30

He returned to the point a year later, urging the “re-education” of those attracted to the organisation in the “days of liberty”:

Some of these elements were gradually drawn into proletarian activities and assimilated the Marxist world-outlook. The others only memorised a few slogans without grasping their meaning, could only repeat old phrases and were unable to adapt the old principles of revolutionary Social-Democratic tactics to the changed conditions.31

What kind of cadre?

The history of Bolshevism, along with the early history of the Comintern or Third International under leaders such as Lenin and Trotsky, which sought to generalise elements of the Russian experience abroad, furnish us with a mass of detailed material on the problem of constructing a cadre in various moments.32 It was, however, left to others to seek to distil the lessons into a more general theoretical framework. I will focus here on the insights of two other Marxists, the Hungarian Georg Lukács, especially his 1924 work Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought, and the Italian Antonio Gramsci, focusing on the Prison Notebooks composed in one of Benito Mussolini’s jails. However, it is first necessary to assess the legacy of Trotsky, as it developed after he was won to Bolshevism in 1917.

Trotsky’s dual legacy

Following the Stalinist counter-revolution of the late 1920s, Trotsky played a crucial role, reflecting on and preserving the best elements of Bolshevism against a mass of myths and distortions. Without his efforts, little of this tradition would survive intact. Yet, no individual, however brilliant, can entirely rise above the social and historical forces with which they grapple. The extreme isolation and repression suffered by Trotsky and his followers—at the hands both of those aligned with western capitalism and Stalinist state capitalism—led to a dual legacy. On the one hand, continued writings of genius and repeated flashes of inspiration; on the other hand, groups of schismatic followers, typically marginal to the working class, who would often come in the post-war period to inflate the claimed significance of their organisations in direct proportion to their impotence.33

In the 1930s, as Cliff pointed out, Trotsky repeatedly proclaimed his band of followers stronger and more numerous than the supporters of Lenin at the outbreak of the First World War.34 Yet, such comparisons were not credible. In 1912, the Bolsheviks returned six deputies to the Tsarist parliament, the Duma, from constituencies with large concentrations of industrial workers. The Bolshevik daily, Pravda, had a circulation of 40,000-60,000, under conditions of intense repression. In 1914, 2,873 workers’ groups in Russia contributed money to the paper.35 The forces Trotsky could mobilise were far weaker, scattered between countries and lacked significant roots within the working class. Despite this, Trotsky would, in 1938, proclaim his Fourth International, an effort to bridge the gap between the demands of the situation—not least the rise of fascism amid a colossal social crisis and the looming World War—and the narrow base of Trotskyism.

Cadrisation and the construction of a leadership is a good idea, but any good idea, carried to illogical extremes, without an accurate assessment of the social context, will produce absurdities. Trotsky would argue: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”.36 Yet, the forces gathered by the Fourth International were in no position to provide this leadership. Trotsky’s writings from the 1930s are full of calls for the “selection” and “education” of cadres.37 However, “education”, without strong connection with the actual struggles of workers, cannot generate a cadre able to synthesise theory and practice or offer a direction for the working class, beyond generalities.38

Worse, Trotsky’s short-term prognosis, that the capitalist system was in its death agony, and that both western capitalism and the Stalinist bureaucracy were teetering on the brink of collapse, simply was not credible during the long boom that followed the war. Had Trotsky not been murdered by a Stalinist agent in 1940, he might have revised his judgement—in his absence his prognosis tended to ossify into an Orthodox Trotskyism that retained little of Trotsky’s brilliance.39

Lukács’s Lenin

One of the first major works to systematically explore what Lenin contributed to the Marxist conception of the party was Lukács’s account, published in 1924, the year of Lenin’s death.

The genius of Lenin, Lukács argued, was to recognise often-subterranean tendencies towards proletarian revolution, to draw on Marxist theory as an expression of the “social existence” of a proletariat “struggling for liberation”, and to apply it to the issues of his day.40 This meant Lenin placed what Lukács called the “actuality of the revolution” at the core of his thought, ensuring that “each individual daily problem” was evaluated “in concrete association with the socio-historic whole”, and linked to the potential for revolution to develop.41 While Bolshevism was enormously flexible in developing specific tactics to advance this or that area of struggle, Lenin consistently subordinated his tactics to a broader revolutionary strategy, encompassing a “combination of tactics which by their association and growth lead to the working class conquest of power”.42 Bolshevik tactical flexibility differed from the unprincipled flexibility and opportunism of the reformist parties, for which tactics were an end in themselves. As Rosa Luxemburg would argue, for Marxists, there is an “indissoluble tie between social reforms and revolution”, whereas for reformists, “The final goal, whatever it may be, is nothing…the movement is everything”.43

Lenin’s revolutionary approach involved bringing all the powers of Marxism to bear on the issues at hand, applying theory to grasp “the reality of the total process, the totality of social development”, and to radically transform this “theoretical insight into practice”.44 As Lukács puts it: “the concrete analysis of the concrete situation is not the opposite of ‘pure’ theory”, but the “culmination of all genuine theory…the point where it…breaks into practice”.45 This was quite the opposite of lapsing into dogmatism and the repetition of eternal verities. As Lenin himself stated, while trying to shift the perspective of his own organisation in April 1917:

“Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action,” Marx and Engels always said, ridiculing the mere memorising and repetition of “formulas”, that at best are capable only of marking out general tasks, which are necessarily modifiable by the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.46

Lukács similarly suggests: “The best theoretical training is absolutely worthless if it limits itself to generalities”.47 The party, he argues, must both have “sufficient theoretical clarity and firmness” to retain its principles when workers are hesitant, even if revolutionaries risk “temporary isolation”, but also a flexibility to learn from the struggles of the masses, to identify within them “revolutionary possibilities of which they have themselves remained unconscious”.48

One thing that emerges from Lukács is the enormous, even daunting, scale of the challenges facing the actual living revolutionaries assembled in an organisation. The party, and the members of which it is composed, should strive to assimilate the richest and most complete understanding of Marxism, to direct it towards concrete analysis of society in its totality, and thus guide practice, while absorbing the lessons to further develop theory. In this conception, Lukács wrote elsewhere: “Organisation is the form of mediation between theory and practice”.49

There are, however, limits to Lukács’s understanding of Lenin and Bolshevism. At times, he overemphasises the homogeneity or cohesion of the party, confusing the model of a centralised, disciplined organisation with the often more chaotic reality. As noted above, the Bolsheviks certainly did not always observe the “strictest party discipline” suggested by Lukács.50 At key moments, such as 1905 and early in 1917, it was certainly not always “a step in front of the struggling masses”, as he suggests it must be.51 There is also a danger inherent in seeing the party as “the tangible embodiment of proletarian class consciousness”, given that any party is composed of entirely fallible human beings.52 In his study of Lenin, Lukács does briefly comment that any party is built by individuals, and that creating an effective party is a process, in which “fruitful interaction between party and class repeats itself—albeit differently—in the relationship between the party and its members”.53 However, that is as far as he goes.

Gramsci and the organic intellectual

In Gramsci, we find a fuller insight into the kind of revolutionaries out of which an effective revolutionary party can be forged.54 A key concept here is that of the “organic intellectual”. The Prison Notebooks, in which this and other concepts are to be found, were written under the noses of Gramsci’s fascist jailors. The work therefore uses a language that is coded and elusive, often disguising acute discussions of the problems of revolutionary socialists as general musings on wider social, historical and cultural themes. The discussion of organic intellectuals is no exception.

To some extent, Gramsci argues, all people are “intellectuals”: even the crudest forms of manual labour involve some level of “creative intellectual activity” and everyone carries some type of intellectual outlook, contributing to sustaining or changing conceptions of the world.55 A social class that might aspire to run society—the rising class of capitalists in pre-capitalist societies, say, or the working class today—has to go beyond this, creating figures who can provide their class with “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields”.56 This can involve assimilating existing “traditional intellectuals”, but it also requires the creation of organic intellectuals, emerging out of but remaining bound to the class in which they originate.57

In the case of the working class, it is necessary, Gramsci argues, to “work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of…the…mass element…to produce…intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset”.58 Gramsci adds: “That all members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals…can easily lend itself to mockery… But…nothing could be more exact.” True, parties might have their own internal structure, their own tiers of leadership, but members share a function that is “directive and organisational”, hence “intellectual”.59

The development of organic intellectuals is not about removing workers from struggles, sending them into the library to ruminate over books in abstraction from activity. The limitations of this approach to cadrisation were well known by Gramsci’s time. Early in his career, some years before the foundation of Bolshevism, Lenin had, like most Russian Marxists, sought to build study-groups among workers. According to one account by a worker involved in such a group, workers were informed they “must be able to explain the origin of the universe and the origin of the species, and must therefore know the theories of Kant, Laplace, Darwin and Lyell”. Lenin himself would recite and explain passages from Capital to workers, something his students later acknowledged was a little challenging. As Neil Harding remarks: “The incomprehension was no more than we might expect. This was…the first contact of a 23-year-old intellectual with the workers in a country where the gulf between these two groups was greater than anywhere else in Europe”.60 Although the meetings certainly furnished Lenin with a rudimentary education into workers’ conditions, the didactic approach tended, where it succeeded at all, to encourage workers to differentiate themselves from their workmates through their learning.

Rather than emphasising abstract book learning divorced from activity, Gramsci, like Lukács, stresses the need to unify theory and practice. This involves “ensuring that…general practical activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world”.61 He adds: “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just simple orator”.62 This means always posing and trying to answer Lenin’s question: “What is to be done?”63 The goal is for organic intellectuals, welded together in a party, to offer leadership and direction to those around them, while collectively reflecting on this activity. This requires the transformation of workers into “qualified political intellectuals, leaders and organisers” of all relevant “activities and functions” across the social, economic and political domains.

However, it is necessary to develop a rigorous Marxist theoretical understanding, going beyond simply learning from experience.64 In this respect, Gramsci describes a revolutionary socialist organisation as the “antithesis of the Catholic” church, which sought to lower the intellectual level to a common dogma. Marxism, by contrast, rejects the idea that one should “leave the ‘simple’ in their primitive philosophy of common sense”. It instead insists on making “politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups”.65 That does not mean that each member of a revolutionary party must immediately know the answer to every question. However, at the very least, when they encounter a pro-capitalist ideologue, they must be confident that, within their group of organic intellectuals, with a shared outlook, someone can confidently “argue better”.66 That in turn requires a culture in which rigorous theoretical discussions regularly take place, interrogating and challenging mainstream ideas in their everyday manifestations but also the more rarified form in which they are presented by traditional intellectuals.

The role of revolutionary parties is thus one of “forming capable leaders”; a party “selects, develops and multiplies the leaders which are necessary if a particular social group…is to…be transformed from turbulent chaos into an organically prepared political army”.67 This does not mean that the conceptions of revolutionary workers are entirely divorced from broader working-class consciousness, creating a vanguard detached from the mass of workers. The working class can, Gramsci insists, gravitate towards revolutionary ideas; it possess a core of “good sense” that is developed in “embryonic” form, appearing “occasionally and in flashes” when the “the group is acting as an organic totality”.68 This embryonic conception of the world is the “healthy nucleus that exists in ‘common sense’, the part of it which can be called ‘good sense’ and deserves to be made more unitary and coherent”.69 However, this conception of the world exists in tension with other forms, “superficially explicit or verbal…inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed”.70 The resulting “contradictory consciousness” can lead to passivity, but, precisely because the two conceptions are in tension with each other, sudden shifts in workers’ activity are possible.71 When struggles do emerge, the organic intellectuals forming the revolutionary party must try to draw out the good sense expressed in struggle, unifying theory and practice, and simultaneously pulling new workers into the organisation:

The parties recruit individuals out of the working mass, and the selection is made on practical and theoretical criteria at the same time. The relation between theory and practice becomes even closer the more the conception is vitally and radically innovatory.72

Duncan Hallas expresses a similar viewpoint in more accessible language:

The job of socialists is to connect their theory and aims with the problems and experiences of militants in such a way as to achieve a synthesis that is both a practical guide to action and a springboard for further advance. Such a synthesis is meaningful to the extent that it actually guides the activities of participants and is modified in the light of practice and [the] changes in circumstances which it itself produces.73

The “permanent persuaders” today

Carefully applied, these approaches are fruitful in thinking about how we should go about cadrisation today. It is certainly the case that the extremely volatile state of politics requires an effective cadre, able to take initiatives and respond clearly and effectively to events. Consider, for instance, the 7 October 2023 Palestinian attacks on Israel. It was far from automatic that workers, even those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, would quickly draw the correct conclusions or feel confident to act on them, especially given the welter of pro-Israeli sentiment from establishment politicians and across the mainstream media. Over time, the public mood shifted in response to the genocidal war waged by Israel, but it was the initial reaction from sections of the left and pro-Palestinian activists that helped galvanise the movement, paving the way for mass protests on the streets and on university campuses. In Britain, groups such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) produced a huge amount of material, not least through this journal, placing the attack in its wider political context, outlining the long oppression of the Palestinians and the likely response from Benjamin Netanyahu, the reasons why the struggle takes the form it does, the role of Zionism and imperialism in the history of Israel, and the need for a one-state solution brought about by wider class struggle in the region.74

Yet, it would be a poor revolutionary party if members simply sat waiting for guidance from headquarters explaining what to think or how to react. The notion of the cadre as obedient foot-soldiers who enact a plan conceived by some “Great Leader” is a Stalinist concoction. Organic intellectuals of groups such as the SWP had to possess a rich independent understanding of theory to rebut the arguments they faced and to lead and direct a response by workers or students. The theory on which they relied was not just rooted in an understanding of the history of the region, but also the crystalised experience of earlier struggles over Palestine in which members took part, a broader assessment of the state of British politics, an ability to grasp the forms of organisation and tactics likely to work to mobilise layers of activists, and so on. Theory alone does not guarantee the correct tactics. Politics is complex, unpredictable and full of uncertainty, making intervention in struggles as much an art as a science, but theory is essential in defining the general contours of the situation and so guiding intervention.75

One important facet of leadership in such moments is the past record of activists. If organic intellectuals are, as Gramsci said, the “permanent persuaders” within the working class, their ability to lead rests on trust earned in earlier phases of struggle over a range of questions. The exercise of hegemony in this context does not depend on winning 100 percent agreement from every worker on every topic. Rather, it is sufficient that some are fully convinced while some merely give the revolutionaries the benefit of the doubt—because they have provided effective practical and ideological leadership in the past. Here, workers tend to judge the integrity of revolutionaries not just on their ability to present arguments that cut with the popular mood, something that a great many reformist activists routinely do, but the unpopular ones as well. For instance, many of the SWP’s cadres led workplaces disputes during the 2022-3 strike wave. That involved not simply organising and coordinating strike action but also warning of the limits of the union bureaucracy and criticising officials who failed to organise sufficiently sustained action, undermined struggles or sought to win support for poor deals. Although these positions were not always universally well-received while the strike wave was on an upward curve, larger numbers of workers became receptive based on their own experience. Again, the arguments in this context were not simply based on practical experience but also reflected an ongoing effort to theorise the nature of trade unions and the relationship between the rank and file and the bureaucracy.76

The centrality of theory

While book learning alone is insufficient to forge organic intellectuals, a culture of reading, and high-level debate and discussion nonetheless remains a vital component of cadrisation. Contrary to depictions of Lenin as a Machiavellian figure, casually deploying theory to suit pragmatic goals, an attempt to rigorously develop and apply Marxist theory played a central role at each stage in the history of Bolshevism. Alex Callinicos puts it well:

[W]hat a serious intellectual biography of Lenin would reveal is less his casual attitude to theory than the systematic manner in which every significant turn in events drove him to reconsider how best the situation was to be understood from a theoretical perspective. Before the 1905 Revolution a rigorous analysis in particular of Russian agrarian structures in The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) provided the theoretical basis of Lenin’s critique of populist hopes of rural socialism… The crisis that the outbreak of the First World War precipitated in the international socialist movement prompted Lenin into a more general reconsideration of socialist theory and strategy that was reflected notably in the Philosophical Notebooks, which were produced by his reading of Hegel, and in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. The process culminated in The State and Revolution, the incomplete text on the Marxist theory of the state written while he was on the run in the summer of 1917, between the February and October revolutions.77

Even if few of us are likely to accomplish what Lenin achieved in the realm of theory, nothing could be more toxic to the development of a revolutionary party than an anti-theoretical atmosphere. To concede to crude anti-intellectualism is to accept the logic that runs through capitalist labour processes operating in the workplace—the separation conception from execution, with the former being the sole concern of capitalists and their hired managers.78 If such an approach is transplanted into the party, it leaves theory to specialised “traditional intellectuals”, cutting the thread linking theory and practice.

Establishing theoretical clarity among members is especially important for a small revolutionary group, and all genuine revolutionary parties today, alas, fit this description. A 1975 letter from Cliff to a Portuguese socialist, Bruno da Ponte, during the revolution in that country, makes the point in relation to the United Revolutionary Front, established by one of the far-left groups: “It will be neither a small sharp axe, nor a big, heavy, if blunt axe. You can cut a tree with both of these, but to cut a tree with a small blunt axe is not on”.79 In other words, if you do not have the weight of a mass organisation behind you, it is essential to offer workers an extremely high degree of political clarity.

Emphasising the need to read is not the same as advocating eclecticism in the realm of theory, something that characterises much of “academic Marxism”, which, because it is divorced from activity, rarely tests its ideas in practice. It is of course necessary to read widely and understand the key debates on the left. It was important Marxists explored Naomi Klein’s No Logo in the late 1990s; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire in the early 2000s; Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century in the 2010s; or Andreas Malm’s How to Blow up a Pipeline more recently.80 These were all books read by a significant minority of participants within movements in which the revolutionary left was involved, and the ideas they contained informed discussions much more widely than they were read. However, such works needed to be read critically from the standpoint of a classical Marxist tradition. The classical nature of this tradition lies precisely in its emphasis on the potential for working class self-emancipation through revolution.81 That does not mean that being part of this tradition exempts Marxists from criticism—even the classical canon is far from univocal, and its development is ceaseless. Capitalism and class struggle continually throw up new situations and challenges, and an absence of further theoretical development will lead to a dogmatism that ultimately distorts practice.82 Nonetheless, conceptualised as a living and developing tradition, the notion of a classical Marxism provides a platform, rooted in the perspective of working-class self-emancipation, from which other theoretical approaches can be appraised.

Unfortunately, this classical tradition has been marginalised through a succession of historical processes. These include the impact of Stalinism from the late 1920s, the revitalisation of social democracy in the economic boom that followed the Second World War and the downturn in workers’ struggles from the late 1970s. Revolutionary organisations are important in fostering engagement with this classical approach.

There are further challenges facing workers who seek to develop their understanding of Marxism even once they join a revolutionary organisation. Time is an obvious limitation, given the pressures capitalism imposes upon us. However, groups of workers have historically carved out time to read when they were politically engaged and motivated to do so. Employees in the most advanced capitalist countries today typically have far more disposable time than 160 years ago, when Marx’s Capital was published. Back then, “workers in the German General Labor Union of New York were…meeting weekly on the Lower East Side in a ‘low, badly ventilated room in the Tenth Ward Hotel’ to read it together”.83 In Britain, in the early 19th century, at time when about a third of workers were entirely illiterate and most of the rest possessed only a rudimentary education, there were lively sales of radical periodicals in working-class districts, clubs formed by weavers to purchase left-leaning newspapers, reading-rooms established by pottery workers, bookshops and coffee houses where subversive literature could be consumed, and small town and village reading groups.84 An even more significant barrier to reading than time is the alienation to which workers are subjected, which demeans their potential intellectual or creative powers. Countering such factors, building a culture of theoretical engagement, is a political project. It must be consciously fought for and renewed. Part of the function of educational meetings or day-schools organised by parties such as the SWP is, beyond furnishing a rudimentary knowledge of Marxism, to create an expectation of further independent reading and collective discussion of theory, and to give workers the confidence to attempt this.

To help motivate reading, a revolutionary organisation should also always seek to demonstrate the value of theory. This is more likely to be clear to members if they are intervening in debates in the trade unions or campaign groups, speaking at party branch meetings or wider movement events, and so on, especially if the experience is collectively reviewed by party members.85 Selling socialist publications, whether on public sales or more systematically in a workplace setting can play a similar role, bringing socialists into contact with wider layers of workers and testing their ideas. Roger Cox, a former engineering industry activist in the SWP and its predecessor, the International Socialists, put it well in an interview in this journal:

I was selling 15 copies of Socialist Worker on the section… Something I often say to younger members is that our ideas can seem futile because you have to constantly repeat them. I had to sell this paper, and it was always difficult. You’d go up and down the line, you know, “Copy of Socialist Worker?”, and people would say, “Banging on in defence of the black and the Irish?” It was a torment, but you have to do it. One day I was in the toilet having a crap reading the Guardian. And in come a couple of guys. One of them is an out and out racist git called George, who says to the other guy who I sold the paper to: “Bloody nig-nogs coming here, etc.” The guy turns round and says, “George, why don’t you shut up.” And he destroys him using the arguments that he’s read in the paper. Then it dawns on you: it’s your consistency that’s being tested. Every week they’re testing you. So every week you’ve got this tension and you have to get through it. Is what you’re saying now the same as what you said last week? If it’s different, why is it different? They’ve got to trust you.86

The cadre and democracy

The issue of cadrisation cannot be divorced from that of party democracy. It is a truism that Leninist organisations are based on something called “democratic centralism”. This is often interpreted in a highly formalistic manner: democratic debate followed by disciplined unity in action. However, in reality, there is a more organic relationship between the two elements, with democracy helping to integrate the experiences of the class in struggle and centralisation allowing the party to test in practice the perspective developed as a result. Hallas explains well the indispensable importance of real debate:

A mass party, unlike a sect, is necessarily buffeted by immensely powerful forces… These forces inevitably find expression inside the party also. To keep the party on course (in practice, to continually correct its course in a changing situation) the complex relationship between the leadership, the various layers of the cadre and the workers they influence and are influenced by, expresses itself and must express itself in political struggle inside the party. If that is artificially smothered by administrative means, the party will lose its way.87

This echoes the approach outlined by Gramsci:

“[C]entralism” in movement, ie a continual adaptation of the organisation to the real movement…a continuous insertion of elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the solid framework of the leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience. Democratic centralism…takes account of movement, which is the organic mode in which historical reality reveals itself, and does not solidify mechanically into bureaucracy; and because at the same time it takes account of that which is relatively stable and permanent.88

He adds that in parties of the working class, “the element of stability is necessary to ensure that hegemony will be exercised not by privileged groups but by progressive elements—organically progressive in relation to other forces which…are heterogeneous and wavering”.89

As this implies, for democratic centralism to function effectively, it requires a cadre with a shared theoretical approach, able to actively intervene and reflect on experience, bringing what they learn to bear on inner-party discussions. The unity of theory and practice here is essential. Debate isolated from practice tends towards abstract scholasticism, but debate isolated from theory tends towards impressionism and superficiality.

Substitution and scaffolding

As should be clear from what has already been said, active intervention in the struggle of the working class is the lifeblood of Marxist organisation. However, a difficulty arises when the working class is relatively subdued, as has been the case in Britain over recent decades. The 2022-3 strike wave interrupted this pattern, furnishing more opportunities to learn and intervene but, overall, the extent of sustained workers’ self-activity from below has remained limited.

Prior to joining the Bolshevik party, Trotsky warned of a danger of “substitutionalism”, in which the party usurps the role of the working class. This would, he argued, create a sort of substitutionalist cascade in which “the organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the central committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally, the ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee”.90 Trotsky would, after 1917, reverse his position and never subsequently wavered from his support for the creation of Bolshevik-type organisations. A discussion of the problem by Cliff did, though, acknowledge the latent possibility in Bolshevism of substitutionalism, arguing that the antidote to this was the “activity of the class itself”.91 Lenin, as we have seen, sought to draw on the vitality of the workers’ upsurges of 1905 or 1917 to counter any such tendencies in Bolshevism.

At present, it is unlikely that a small revolutionary party such as the SWP would try to substitute itself, or other social forces, for the working class, but we can see in the context of limited struggle, dangers of other elements of the cascade effect discussed by Trotsky. The low level of workers’ self-activity means that it is rare to draw into revolutionary organisation self-confident militants with experience leading struggle.92 Moreover, because Marxism is so far from the “common sense” in society at large, a lot of those who join revolutionary organisations do so without much of the general understanding that informed the far left historically. Even among students, while there is often exposure to radical currents of thought, including those that reference Marxism, these are usually quite far from the classical Marxist tradition and rarely seek to unify theory and practice. These limitations create a temptation for the experienced cadre in the party to carry out its key functions—organising its branches, for instance, and bearing responsibility for articulating its key ideas or leading its intervention in wider struggles. This can inhibit newer members from learning or indeed bringing their creativity to bear on the activities in which the revolutionary left engages. It is possible under these circumstances for organisations to grow without renewing or developing their cadre.93

Remedying this requires conscious effort. Educating new members is crucial but this cannot be divorced from a need to raise the theoretical level of the party as a whole—the goal is not just to reproduce the current level of theoretical understanding but to elevate it for all, creating the kind of culture of ongoing debate and discussion described above. This must be linked to practice, and a more considered approach to involving members in that practice. For instance, regular caucuses of members, both new and old, should discuss what is being done in a particular campaign, and why, and assess the successes or failures of those tactics. New members should be encouraged to give branch meetings and to take on organisational tasks, while discussing with the more experienced how best to do this. Organisation always involves “crafts skills”, with elements of “artfulness, prudence, knowledge of angles and wangles, creative adaptation. Such craft knowledge is transmissible, often by ‘apprenticeship’ rather than traditional academic means”.94 One-to-one mentorship can be helpful in this regard, although the rounded development of cadres often involves learning from a range of more experienced ones, each with different strengths and approaches. One of the biggest challenges is the need for newer members to grasp how to work in sustained but often conflictual relationships with people to their right politically—through united front activity or work in the trade unions. This involves complex discussions, and so, in the absence of mass struggles rooted in the workplace, it is a key terrain on which members can begin to train themselves in strategy and tactics. Experienced members—who usually have the advantage of having built a reputation among the left activists in their area, so facilitating the construction of broader movements—are crucial to this work, but newer ones should also be involved at every opportunity.

This cannot be a case of throwing new comrades in at the deep end and seeing whether they sink or swim. Rather, we can repurpose some ideas developed by the Marxist psychologist and educationalist Lev Vygotsky.95 Vygotsky and his co-thinkers argued that “even at the level of learning…‘mind’ is a social relation rather than an individual property stored in the head…people learn through acting in concrete, historically determinate situations in attempts to craft coherence amid social contradictions”.96 Vygotsky is perhaps best known to educationalists for concepts such as the “zone of proximal development”, the gap between what could be done independently by a child and what could be done “through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers”.97 Through operating in this zone, with appropriate scaffolding provided by peers or teachers, students could develop both a greater capacity to achieve their task independently, and in doing so develop abstract and general forms of theoretical insight that could be applied to a range of concrete situations.98

It would be a mistake to treat new members of an organisation as “children” or experienced members as “adults” or purely as “teachers”. As I have argued, cadrisation ought to be an ongoing process across a party as a whole and, as Lenin recognised, at critical moments the party must learn from the struggles of the class—and newer members can by crucial to assimilating these lessons. Nonetheless, a broader conception of consciousness and learning can be found here that applies beyond narrow educational contexts.99 Marxists have certainly sought to generalise Vygotsky’s ideas to understand the learning and developmental processes that take place within social movements. As John Krinsky and Colin Barker argue:

Consciousness in all its aspects is not simply something that occurs only through quasi-natural individual psychological development, but is built up, mediated by individuals’ active social relations with others. So also with social movement strategising: the idea of cooperative, social learning extends to learning by adults whose lives, in a sense, involve constant “strategic” work.100

I do not see any reason why such an approach could not also be generalised to the collective learning that takes place within a revolutionary party as it seeks to intervene strategically in the world. Common efforts to intervene through a revolutionary party should push less experienced members to operate beyond what they could accomplish as individuals, but with scaffolding and support from more experienced comrades, and collective reflection on the results. Put more crudely: no comrade should do what a less experienced one can do with suitable support, and no comrade should do alone what they could do in cooperation with a less experienced one. This should occur without creating an atmosphere in which experienced comrades are seen as the fount of all wisdom or exempt from the need for further development, and without stifling the creativity of participants in the party, new or old.

Conclusion

Recent events appear to indicate that we have reached an inflexion point in history, a moment in which capitalism descends more deeply into turmoil, destroying many of the institutions and structures through which it has reproduced itself in recent history, and throwing up a sequence of crises.101

The most striking response has been the rise of a global far right eager to capitalise on the chaos, epitomised above all by the return of Donald Trump as US president. We do not know precisely what opportunities will be created for struggle and resistance led by the far left in this context—but we can be sure that the future will look strikingly different to the recent past. We will face an increasingly stark version of Rosa Luxemburg’s choice: between socialism and barbarism. If we are to seize effectively any possibilities open to us, the issue of renewing the revolutionary socialist tradition is crucial. Cadrisation, developing organic intellectuals who can give direction to the struggles around them, is essential if we are to offer hope amid the burgeoning horror.

Joseph Choonara is the editor of International Socialism. He is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Marx’s Capital (Bookmarks, 2017) and Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy (2nd edition: Bookmarks, 2017).

Notes