In Leninist Marxism, Professional revolutionaries, (or a cadre), is a body of devoted communists who spend the majority of their free time organizing 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.

Most Marxists agree that a cadre is necessary in one form or another; Trotsky in particular did not believe that these professional revolutionaries, or vanguardism in general, was to blame for what they considered the eventual "totalitarian" (what they term Stalinist) nature of the Soviet Union, nor the situations in China, the DPRK, and other Communist states; instead they cite as the true causes the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the case of Russia, the practices of Maoists, and other Marxist-Leninist parties.

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" ideal (party physically composed of the masses of people, rather than an elite intellectual core) advocated especially strongly by Mao, although never realized under his leadership in China. Such communists therefore today advocate for a current version of a "mass party" of working class people, thereby in their view maximizing direct participation in the revolution and the subsequent revolutionary government.

Alexandre Jardin (b. April 14, 1965) is a French writer, and winner of the Prix Femina, 1988, for Le Zèbre.

Philippe Decouflé (born Neuilly-sur-Seine, October 22, 1961) is a French choreographer, dancer, mime artist, and theatre director. As a child he travelled extensively around Lebanon and Morocco, before learning his skills as a teenager at the Annie Fratellini Ecole du Cirque and the Marceau Mime School. While frequenting Parisienne nightclubs he discovered and was attracted to contemporary dance, and he eventually moved to the Centre National de la Danse Contemporaine in Angers to study under choreographer Alwin Nicolais. After briefly working as a solo dancer, he formed the Découflé Company of Arts in Bagnolet in 1983, moving it to a former electrical works in the Parisienne suburb of Saint-Denis in 1995.

He has worked for the Lyon Opera Ballet, and choreographed the music video for New Order's True Faith and Fine Young Cannibals' She Drives Me Crazy. The former won the "Best Music Video" prize at the 1988 BRIT Awards, while his advertisement for Polaroid won a "Silver Lion" prize at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. On the back of these successes, he was selected to choreograph the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Winter Olympics in front of a global television audience of over two billion people, the 50th anniversary Cannes Film Festival in 1997, and a parade for the 2007 Rugby World Cup in Saint-Denis in Paris.