Revolutionary leadership comes disproportionately from those privileged by the system they attack

Evidence

With Lenin’s notion of a cadre of professional revolutionists, the beginnings of the vanguard party in mind, James went so far as to designate an entire stratum, describing in precise terms how it was formed: “The leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit by the cultural advantages of the system they are attacking” (p. 19). This was an admission of class pride that neither Lenin nor Marx or Engels had been prepared to make. Though surely it was an inadvertent admission, one that revealed James’s own class origins, it also reflected a certain historical clarity. The petit bourgeois intelligentsia had played dominant roles in Marxist thought as well as in the Bolshevik victory in Russia. The theory and the ideology of revolution was theirs, and unarguably too, the Russian state. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1292

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s institution work: those who stand to lose most from a system’s collapse are rarely its gravediggers; also connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s class dynamics.