Centrist Marxism

Centrism refers to a left-wing socialist current within the Marxist workers' movement, which sought to mediate between revolutionary and reformist politics. The term originally referred to the " Marxist center " in the SPD to Karl Kautsky and August Bebel and is used pejoratively in Leninist and related terminology.

Marxism

As originally centrists were the followers of the group formed by the Social Democratic Party theoretician Kautsky and the party leadership of the SPD. Their position was attacked by the party left to Rosa Luxembourg and the emergent Communists. The main criticism was particularly the growing parliamentary system and the institutionalization of the party. In the second mass strike debate 1909/10 there was a split between the radical left and the Marxist center, as Kautsky and the party leadership refused to bring the three-class suffrage in Prussia by mass action basis. As a "third way " was the "center" of a reference point for the Austro-Marxism to Otto Bauer.

The Declaration of the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in 1928, the general line for the defense of Marxism- Leninism against Trotskyism and centrism against splittism and conciliation, called centrism an " ideology of adaptation, an ideology of subordination of proletarian interests to the interests of the petty bourgeoisie. " Leon Trotsky, in turn, defined centrism as " all those currents in the proletariat and on the periphery [ ... ] that propagate between reformism and Marxism and mostly different development stages on the way from reformism to Marxism and represent vice versa." Lenin himself wrote in 1917 about the centrists:

The term was not only related in sequence to Kautsky, but on further to concurents communist directions and organizations. So Trotsky called for example, the Stalinist party rule a " bureaucratic centrism "; centrists as the followers of Lenin and Soviet communism were also International Association of Socialist parties, the POUM and the SAP. In the political discourse delineation of left and radical left-wing groups, the term appears in its negative and polemical connotation today.