Information about Cadre

En cadre is a military expression for a group around whom a unit is formed, or a training staff. For other uses of the term, see Cadre (disambiguation).

Cadre (from the French; pronounced /kɑdʀ/, CAH-druh) are the backbone of an organization, usually a political organization. The assumption of the cadre model is that this small core of ultra-committed people are capable of recreating the organization's structure and ideological direction even if the current organizational form has been destroyed and all other members have been killed or imprisoned. For professional revolutionaries the cadre consider themselves subject to the discipline and self-discipline of a political vanguard party model.

Radical Left movements in particular have maintained their minimum program of survival and growth very effectively through the strength of a cadre system. Basic success within a movement in which cadre are the vanguard comes when one core of cadre has gradually recruited and trained another group of cadre to ensure the perpetuation of the movement. This, in theory, both strengthens the movement politically and promotes a culture of emulation over that of competition.

Cadres existed historically in Communist China as small factions of Mao Zedong's Communist Party who could maintain the party for as long as needed.

The term is also commonly used in other venues to indicate an "original" or "leadership" group, i.e. the "first set" of users of a system who then will act as the seed-group who gain initial experience with a system, in order to facilitate its later use by a more general population. An example would be the "Initial Cadre" of pilots trained in a new airplane by the manufacturer, in advance of the more formal training that later pilots of the type might undergo at the airline, i.e. "users", level. The term in this case assumes that the group is able to explore a system and determine by experimentation what later standards will be used to train the follow-on users, and further connotates that the original group will then train the instructors who will then interface with the final users group. The term has the additional connotation of "Initial" or "Original".

See also

• Professional revolutionaries
• Vanguard party