A political position, impeccable in its literal wording, that is stated in a consciously ambiguous way, allowing a slide in practice towards positions that, without requiring any new statement, nevertheless fall outside the class boundaries (internationalism, centralism).
The class nature of centrism
Centrism does not reflect the interests of a specific stratum, but the influence of capitalist ideology within the class through the opportunist tendencies in its militant groups.
Centrism reflects the transitional process within the proletariat, the different waves within its different layers and the difficulties that obstruct the advance towards definitive revolutionary positions.
L. D. Trotsky. What is centrism?
Centrism and opportunism
Centrism is an opportunism in deeds that dresses itself up either as theoretical intransigence in the letter or as a merely formal or legal concession to circumstances. An example of this latter form of centrism can be seen clearly in the degenerative process of the Fourth International during the second imperialist war.
Russia was still absent from the war when the first symptoms of going astray appeared in the American party (Socialist Workers Party). Shortly afterwards, with the whole world already in the slaughter, the S.W.P. deliberately withdrew its revolutionary formulations against the imperialist war and refused to take any action of struggle against it. It justified itself by claiming to be camouflaging itself from the police eye and adapting its tone to what the then patriotic ears of the proletariat could take in.
But the most despicable and at the same time tragic thing about opportunism is that, while cutting off its own access to the revolutionary education and mobilization of the masses, it does not, however, escape the blows of reaction unless it submits to it entirely. Thus the leaders of the S.W.P. found themselves sarcastically accused by their government of internationalism and revolutionary defeatism, the very thing they were dodging, and went to prison for a year and a half or two for a crime they had the duty to commit, but which they always took good care not to commit. [...]
Before their judges they proclaimed not the need to transform the imperialist war into civil war, but into a true war against fascism. They clumsily accused the American government of being incapable of finishing off Berlin, and their press presented splendid programs to defeat Hitler. The words revolutionary defeatism gave them the creeps and they vetoed them. All internationalist formulations were carefully struck out of magazine and newspaper, including the mere word imperialism unless it referred to the national enemy.
Throughout the whole war -an argument overwhelming in itself- they did not organize a single action against it, nor did they hand out a single leaflet. In short, comparing their policy with that of the centrist parties of the time, the British I.L.P. and the Spanish P.O.U.M., the similarity between the two even reached the point of terminological identity. In a word, the S.W.P. replaced revolutionary policy with the bourgeois and Stalinist policy of antifascism, a mere trick of imperialist conscription twin to the Hitlerian struggle against plutocracy.
All this was done in the name of tactics and educational efficiency. It is an old custom of opportunists to present their abandonment of principles as practicality or as making things easier for the masses, and at the same time, in moments of repression, as an unavoidable protective legalism. They claim to be deceiving the class enemy when in reality they are receiving its influence; they boast of educating and winning the masses, while they soften the revolutionary content of their own militants. The masses can only be drawn to revolutionary principles and action by formulations and attitudes of the utmost clarity.
The example of the S.W.P. spread. Shortly after its opportunist turn, the British section of the Fourth International, which had achieved considerable growth by supporting the strikes that Labourites and Trade Unions patriotically condemned, was also put on trial. Its main leader and defendant chose to defend himself, also invoking practical reasons, with the wretched opportunist verbiage of the Socialist Workers Party.
G. Munis. The Fourth International