The following speech was given by Stefan Engel, long-time chairman of the MLPD and today head of the theoretical organ Revolutionärer Weg, at midnight during the New Year’s Eve party in Gelsenkirchen:

Everyone is talking about crises. The conclusions each person draws from them naturally differ. The bourgeois politicians want to end the crises very quickly – through a makeshift crisis management that is being proposed to us in the run-up to the February election. But none of them can really solve the crises because they are law-based crises of this society. They express the fact that society no longer functions.

Imagine you go to the doctor for an examination. You have a brain tumor, a prostate problem, diabetes, arthrosis and a bad knee. Any normal doctor would immediately send you to the hospital and say, “This must be thoroughly examined first and then carefully treated.” But what do bourgeois politicians do? They do it quite differently. They don’t send capitalism to the hospital, but muddle on and on and on, hurling insults at each other. Basically, they all have no real solution.

We Marxist-Leninists deal with crises differently. First, we examine where the crises come from. Second, we follow the Chinese language, in which the character for “crisis” contains the characters for “destruction” and “new beginning”. This dual concept is dialectical!

Crises must be taken as an opportunity to begin something new, which then has a creative effect that helps you to get well again, that gives you a brighter outlook. Crises always also create friction, heat, contradiction. Those in power always want to quickly dampen contradictions. Workers best should not go on strike to preserve their jobs. Then some kind of shoddy compromise is pulled out of the hat. Keep calm, we have to stand together, said Olaf Scholz in his New Year’s Eve address today. We’re supposed to stand together especially with those responsible for all the problems and crises here. No! We won’t stand together with them.

Crises create movement. And when something starts moving, it is the basis for improvement. It is not when calm prevails that the world changes, but when movement increases – with consciousness and clarity about where we have to go.

We have to focus on our strengths. We mustn’t always make ourselves so small. The bourgeois politicians always want to make us small. Well, do you think any party in Gelsenkirchen could get up a New Year’s Eve celebration like this one? No, not one of them could!

Do you think any party other than ours could collect 40,000 signatures in just a few weeks to qualify for the elections? They wouldn’t be able to. But we can do it because we have firm convictions and a strong organization; an idea where this society has to go.

We don’t subscribe to the idea that things should continue as they are. The slogan for these elections cannot be “more of the same”. Fundamental change is what is needed!

Change for a new society in which all the positive things which humanity has produced really are used for the good of humanity, and not for a few super-billionaires who can’t get enough. The whole problem in a nutshell: we live in a society in which profit comes before everything else. Those in power couldn’t care less how people are faring.

I hope that the New Year will continue to see a lot of movement, but also more consciousness, even greater will to fight and, above all, growth of prospects. Anyone who wants to contribute to this is welcome to join us.

I wish everyone good health and well-being. And if you have problems, then overcome them together. This is the right solution. This is the school of the way to make things move forward. This is why we will keep moving in the New Year 2025.

But one must know that there are different directions of movement. There is a backward direction and a forward direction. It is not uncommon now for people to think that they have to give the right-wingers a chance to govern. That is a worldwide tendency. You see it in the USA, in Italy or the Czech Republic, in Argentina, Russia, and in the AfD, too. Elon Musk, the Tesla boss from the USA who is raking in money all over the world with his electric cars, used to be a convinced democrat. Today he is an ardent supporter of the fascist President Trump. Something has moved in Musk too, but backwards. The man is getting crazier and crazier.

Our clarity, our confidence, our struggle, our perspective, our sense of responsibility for all humanity, and international solidarity – these are our strengths. They will prevail. My wish is for a successful year 2025, to which we will toast together in just a moment.

Stefan Engel

Gabi Fechtner, MLPD Chairwoman:

Training camp for the working-class offensive

The monopolies in Germany are risking an open attack on the industrial workforce on several fronts. In their main strongholds they have terminated class collaboration to achieve this.

In almost all monopolies, but also in many small enterprises, jobs are being destroyed on a massive scale, more and more in conjunction with open mass layoffs, plant closures and wage cuts. The aim here is to set a political example. VW was a flagship of the class collaboration policy; now the company is to be the flagship for implementing a reactionary turn of the monopolies.

The process of political ferment, with more than seven million people taking part in workers’ and people’s struggles this year, has taken on a new quality since late summer with the intervention of the industrial proletariat. The progressive change in mood is again coming more to the fore. Since September, around one million industrial workers have taken part in strikes and protests—around 250,000 in the last three weeks alone.

Meanwhile, a potential for the transition to the working-class offensive is developing, which is beginning to break through.

There are different sides to this:

• Class consciousness has awakened in industrial workforces, albeit not yet on a broad front. Growing sections are consciously breaking with company philosophies like the “VW family” and the decades-long policy of class collaboration.

• The MLPD is effectively inflencing a mass discussion among tens of thousands of industrial workers, even though there is not yet agreement on all questions. Individual demands and slogans of the workplace groups of the MLPD have achieved opinion leadership. This concerns the struggle for every job and training place, the need for the trade unions as fighting organizations, or the necessity for workforces to struggle company-wide and across corporate boundaries. Anticommunism is losing its deterrent effect, but is again being employed more often. Still more thorough clarification is needed, for only if it is overcome can a mass turn to genuine socialism come about and a relationship of trust with the MLPD develop.

• A dynamic surge of union-led and independent struggles is characteristic. “Ready to strike nationwide” has become the slogan of the masses. Militant trade union action usually originates from the huge desire for militant activity among the workforce. This is also shown by a series of independent assemblies and demonstrations and mostly still smaller self-organized strike actions. At VW, Ford and Thyssenkrupp we have not seen so many such actions in years. Even though only a minority of the workforces have taken part so far, a majority say, “Actually you are right!” The attacks of the monopolies can only be repulsed in a hard struggle. It is becoming particularly important to break through the union framework when necessary and to move on to independent strikes. These weeks are an important training camp for this.

• Thousands of salaried employees demonstrated independently in advance of the works meeting at VW Wolfsburg. This has strategic significance because the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia is the main ally of the working class.

• Repression is increasing and often has an intimidating effect. Countering this there were several pioneering successes in the struggle for democratic rights and freedoms of workers. Companies such as Tesla, CATL or K+S have tried to fire militant colleagues, but have not succeeded. The demand for a full legal right to strike in all matters is being discussed on a massive scale. When the workers no longer avoid confrontation with the state apparatus, it marks a transition to revolutionary ferment.

• The interpenetration with struggles of the broad masses must still be improved. Parts of the Fridays for Future movement, and now the “Students against the Right”, meanwhile consciously refer to the workers as an important force and turn to them. In Kreuztal, a self-organized demonstration of the Thyssenkrupp workers took place together with the population.

• Among the militant sections of the workforces there is growing criticism of the reformists. There is growing vigilance and irreconcilability towards secret negotiations, austerity programs, or “pinprick” strike tactics. Some reformists claim that independent strikes would be “running into an open knife”. However, you don’t run into an open knife when you fight, but when you raise your hands in surrender to the general attack of capital.

• In recent years, the ethnocentric and social-chauvinist mode of thinking has been quite capable of hindering the development of class consciousness. However, workers get better at dealing with this in the course of developing class consciousness. A recent study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation found that among workers who have an “awareness of antagonistic class interests,” “neither the center-right nor the right-wing extremists” could score. The crude ethno-nationalist appeal to “us Germans” does not go down well when German monopolies behave in such anti-labor fashion. The AfD shows its anti-labor face more openly when it calls the wage demands of the VW workers “crazy” and agitates against strikes. Politically significant was the expulsion of AfD representatives by Zwickau VW colleagues at their company meeting.

Precisely because the changes are so great, the workers must be given time to process them and to grasp the new challenges. From our side, it is important to develop and advance forward-looking demands, slogans, fighting tactics and forms of organization. Only if they are made public and widely discussed can the right ideas become a material force. And only in connection with practical fighting experience does class consciousness develop. It is extremely significant that this process has begun.