Suggestion[edit source]
It would be good if the article distinguished this concept from the kind of centrism Stalin criticised here, I think I remember seeing somebody quote this at Infrared once:
- But if we uphold the slogan of a fight on two fronts, does this mean that we are proclaiming the necessity of Centrism in our Party? What does a fight on two fronts mean? Is this not Centrism? You know that that is exactly how the Trotskyists depict matters: there are the "Lefts," that is, "we," the Trotskyists, the "real Leninists"; there are the "Rights," that is, all the rest; and, lastly, there are the "Centrists," who vacillate between the "Lefts" and the Rights. Can that be considered a correct view of our Party? Obviously not. Only people who have become confused in all their concepts and who have long ago broken with Marxism can say that. It can be said only by people who fail to see and to understand the difference in principle between the Social-Democratic party of the pre-war period, which was the party of a bloc of proletarian and petty-bourgeois interests, and the Communist Party, which is the monolithic party of the revolutionary proletariat.
- Centrism must not be regarded as a spatial concept: the Rights, say, sitting on one side, the "Lefts" on the other, and the Centrists in between. Centrism is a political concept. Its ideology is one of adaptation, of subordination of the interests of the proletariat to the interests of the petty bourgeoisie within one common party. This ideology is alien and abhorrent to Leninism.
- Centrism was a phenomenon that was natural in the Second International of the period before the war. There were Rights (the majority), Lefts (without quotation marks), and Centrists, whose whole policy consisted in embellishing the opportunism of the Rights with Left phrases and subordinating the Lefts to the Rights.