Final Resolution of the Stuttgart Party Congress of the MLPD 2012

1. Following intensive preparation by the entire party, the MLPD very successfully held its 2012 Stuttgart Party Congress. For one year the party rank-and-file discussed the draft report of the Central Committee, put forward motions, carefully selected its candidates for the central bodies. In conjunction with the critical and self-critical study and creative implementation of Revolutionärer Weg, Nos. 32–34, Strategy and Tactics of the International Socialist Revolution, the Party Congress was able to provide concise, well-founded, optimistic answers to the burning questions of our time. More than 1,640 motions, 139 prepared written contributions and 411 orally presented contributions testify to the high quality of the ideological-political preparation. Forward to the international socialist revolution instead of worship of spontaneity – this battle was successfully fought out at the Ninth Party Congress of the MLPD!

2. The MLPD is a revolutionary working-class party, the party of youth, of women's liberation, of proletarian internationalism, of radical environmental protection, of the struggle for peace, of uncompromising antifascist struggle, and of the struggle for democratic rights and freedoms – the party of the liberation of all those exploited and oppressed by imperialism. The delegates embodied all these hallmarks: 78 percent of the delegates were of proletarian class situation; 59 percent hold trade-union functions; 40 percent of the delegates were women; 6.5 percent have foreign roots.

3. The Party Congress intensely discussed the complicated world economic situation. Just a year after the deep downturn of the world economy in 2008, Chancellor Merkel was sounding off again about a new upswing. It was supposed to revive the flagging self-healing powers of the prostrate world economy. Not even two years later the engine of the world economy was sputtering again.

The persisting world economic and financial crisis deepened and the sharply increased state debt reached a dimension which makes it unpayable for more and more countries.

The Party Congress proved bourgeois economics guilty of plain quackery. The international crisis management was able to slow the world economic and financial crisis only temporarily. It diverted it to the national budgets and thrust many European economies even deeper into the crisis.

The result is an extremely uneven world economic development which harbingers periods of great changes. The central axis of the world economy has shifted from the axis USA/Europe to the transpacific axis USA/Asia. Solely ruling international finance capital had itself recapitalized with bailout funds, whereas the non-monopoly bourgeoisie, the neocolonially dependent economies and above all the workers and the broad masses must bear the burden of the crisis. The storm clouds of a renewed deep downturn of the world economy that will cause the pent-up contradictions to erupt already are looming on the horizon.

4. The potential for a revolutionary world crisis has been building up further, at times still under the surface. Economic and political mass strikes especially in the crisis-stricken countries of Southern Europe, the movement of democratic uprisings in 2010/2011 in the Arab countries, but also the miners' struggles from South Africa to Spain testify to an upswing of the class struggle on an international scale.

The international industrial proletariat has awakened. The storm of economic and political mass struggles in Europe, in particular Southern Europe, indicates that important steps already have been taken towards the internationalization of class struggle. More and more the international industrial proletariat takes the lead in these mass strikes and demonstrations, whose main thrust has increasingly clearer anticapitalist contours.

The people's struggles and the rebellion of youth experience an upturn internationally. In the main this is still a spontaneous reaction to imperialism's oppression of the masses, which takes on ever more comprehensive and varied forms.

The Party Congress underscored that everything will be done to promote the process of the internationalization of class struggle and the transition from the first to the second stage of the class struggle and to the acutely revolutionary situation. The MLPD will do its utmost to make the joint coordination and mutual revolutionization of the workers' and people's struggles develop into a struggle against imperialism and for socialism. To this end it will step up its efforts to win over the decisive majority of the international industrial proletariat in Germany, will unfold the struggles of the working class and the people's masses and give them an internationalist orientation, and will increasingly cooperate with progressive migrant organizations. The MLPD helps the masses to come successfully to grips with the petty-bourgeois nationalist and petty-bourgeois internationalist modes of thinking.

5. One focal topic of the Party Congress was the taking of a clear stand on the environmental issue.

The Party Congress condemned the initiated environmental policy rollback, which subsidizes the international supermonopolies with billions in profits. Solely ruling international finance capital sacrifices the natural environment on the altar of its craving for profit. The result is that the begun transformation of the environmental crisis into a global environmental catastrophe has even gained momentum.

The Party Congress stated: anyone who really wants to preserve and raise the unity of humankind and nature to a higher level must participate in building an international front of resistance for saving the environment from the profit system.

The Party Congress resolved to overcome any disregard for the environmental issue in the work of the MLPD. Marxist-Leninist environmental work must become the second most important line of struggle, after the main fighting line of factory and union work, and an integral part of all party work. Starting immediately, the MLPD resolutely will build environmental groups. It takes up the proposal to build an ueberparteilich environmental union und promotes it with intense efforts. In the strategy debate in the working-class and people's movements it will argue the case for giving the environmental movement a new quality. The environmental movement must

1. acquire an increasingly society-changing character. In the end, the environment only can be saved if capitalism is superseded by socialism;

2. better organize itself to form a superior force against the environment-destroying profit system.

3. In the environmental movement the working class must become the leading force which must closely unite with the various other forces of the militant environmental movement from the petty-bourgeois intermediate strata and extending to parts of the non-monopoly bourgeoisie.

4. The environmental movement must acquire an international character and coordinate and mutually strengthen the activities in the various countries of the world.

The Party Congress criticized an economist tendency to push aside the problem of the unity of humanity and nature. This tendency in the international revolutionary and working-class movement has its ideological roots in the reformist suppression of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. In the reformist view, the source of all wealth is only labor, whereas Marx called nature the "mother" and labor the "father" of all the wealth of use-values. The Party Congress instructed the Central Committee to speed up the elaboration of Revolutionärer Weg, No. 35, Class Struggle and the Struggle for the Unity of Humanity and Nature, as ideological-political foundation of this struggle for the foundations of human existence.

6. The Party Congress emphasized that the necessary worldwide coordination and revolutionization of the struggles is not just a spontaneous process. The most important conclusion drawn by the Party Congress is the vigorous support of the building and development of ICOR, the revolutionary world organization founded in 2010. The Party Congress orientated mainly towards the significant strengthening of mutual support in party-building. At the same time the ICOR encourages the multifaceted international coordination and revolutionization of the movements of the workers and masses, such as that for the First International Miners' Conference in 2013.

Accordingly, never before did a Party Congress of the MLPD draw so much attention in the international Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement as this Ninth Party Congress did. This found expression in the active participation of 23 delegations of Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations and 45 further messages of greetings from all over the world.

In a donation campaign leading up to the Party Congress the members and friends of the MLPD collected more than 500,000 euros for the internationalist work of the MLPD, of which ten percent went directly to ICOR as a donation. For the complete financing of the Ninth Party Congress 100,000 euro were donated in the MLPD. This bespeaks a high level of consciousness and the refreshing optimism of a healthy party.

To strengthen ICOR, further forces must be freed and ICOR firmly established among the masses. The Party Congress undertook the commitment to struggle resolutely for a new quality of proletarian internationalism in the various fields of work.

7. Those in power carry their modern anticommunism campaign to increasingly grotesque extremes because bourgeois ideology is less and less able to exert a positive bonding force on the masses. Their aim is to ostracize Marxism-Leninism and to increase the relative isolation of the MLPD at a time when more and more people are searching for a societal alternative beyond capitalist exploitation and oppression.

The answer of the Ninth Party Congress of the MLPD to this is an offensive against modern anticommunism and for genuine socialism. We will expose and attack the reactionary, undemocratic and partly even protofascist character of anticommunism. On a massive scale we will proudly spread our Marxist-Leninist freedom ideology among the masses and so give them a new social perspective. While modern anticommunism lives on vague reservations, Marxism-Leninism thrives on a spirit of freedom, of independent thinking, feeling and acting.

8. Against this backdrop there is an increased process of detachment of the petty-bourgeois intellectual intermediate strata from the dictatorship of the monopolies. This must be used by the MLPD to intensify and systematize the preparation of the alliance with these strata.

9. The MLPD sees itself as a party of a new type. It has drawn the lessons from the deepest defeat of the international working-class movement: the revisionist degeneration of all former socialist countries. One of the most important conclusions was independent control commissions which are accountable only to the Party Congresses and also exercise independent control over the CC.

In 2005 a deep crisis of the Central Control Commission (CCC) became manifest. It made a First Extraordinary Party Congress of the MLPD necessary. It was an unprecedented occurrence that at that time the danger of a revisionist degeneration of the party arose from the very central control organ that is supposed to prevent this under all circumstances.

In an unparalleled mobilization of the entire party the members, the CC and the CCC comrades themselves fought for their control commission. In greatest frankness, in the intervening time cases of heartless cadre treatment were reviewed and serious mistakes and undesirable developments were uncovered and cleared up. The MLPD is proud that it does not judge people by their mistakes, but by the way they deal with their mistakes. As a result, all comrades concerned could be won over to carry out the necessary candid reappraisal and self-transformation. They freed themselves of an "arrogance of control" which sought to give the CCC a special role as against the rights and duties of the members. The Party Congress impressively demonstrated that the members are the masters of the party. Proletarian control and self-control prevailed over the influences of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois control and self-control, which justified the independence of the CCC in a petty-bourgeois way, as if the CCC stood outside the system of self-control.

The Eighth Party Congress already was able to diagnose the end of the crisis of the CCC. The report of the CCC and the discussion of it at this Ninth Party Congress signaled that the CCC bit by bit has regained its independence on the foundation of the proletarian mode of thinking, has found its place in the system of self-control and is on the right track. This found expression in open, candid criticism and self-criticism and in a relationship with the party as one "between equals."

From the crisis of the CCC the party drew the conclusion that it can cope successfully with the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking only through an entire party system of self-control. The control from above, through the CCC, acts together with the control from below, through the members, and with the self-control of every single cadre as a dialectical unity. The party rank and file are the foundation of the system of self-control and the main factor in the party's self-transformation. Through the system of self-control the proletarian mode of thinking gains it decisive superiority in the struggle against the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking.

The Party Congress, by exemplarily practicing the system of self-control, was able to discuss and clear up with a proletarian culture of debate many problems which had arisen over the past years. The debate which unfolded over party work in the movement against "Stuttgart 21," as a historically unprecedented mass movement, was clarified in a creative way: the MLPD has the task of taking up such challenges, learning from the masses, establishing the unity of working-class movement and people's movement, and conducting such struggles as a school of class struggle.

The general crisis-proneness of imperialism unfolds and intensifies the struggle between the proletarian and the petty-bourgeois modes of thinking, for which reason the Party Congress sharpened revolutionary vigilance. Modern anticommunism is a social, ideological system which, moreover, constantly exerts a corrosive influence on the working class and the party. The system of self-control organizes how in the struggle against the petty-bourgeois anticommunist mode of thinking a new revolutionary self-confidence can emerge and consolidate. Successfully coping with all influences of the petty-bourgeois anticommunist mode of thinking is its central content. The Ninth Party Congress spelled an important victory of the doctrine of the mode of thinking over modern anticommunism, which defames the system of self-control as brainwashing and repressive submission. For us it is a liberating instrument enabling unerring adherence to and accomplishment of the goals of the working-class movement.

10. The Party Congress observed that in the past few years the MLPD, under the most complicated conditions, has developed in a positive way, strengthened itself and extended its work to new fields. A particularly big success was the Marxist-Leninist work among women in conjunction with the First World Women's Conference of rank-and-file women.

This development is one of the most outstanding results of the doctrine of the mode of thinking, which emphasizes that party work must always take place in an intensive relation with the self-organization of the masses. Party work thus develops interrelationships with self-run organizations of the most diverse kinds. In addition to being members of the MLPD, 75 percent of the delegates to the Stuttgart Party Congress are active in ueberparteilich women's, local-policy, environmentalist and internationalist self-run organizations; 89 percent in the trade unions. Increasingly, in future the MLPD will promote internationalist self-run organizations and inject the militant element of internationalism into all self-run organizations of the masses.

11. Despite the intensified banking and business boycott, the MLPD succeeded in defending and extending its financial independence. The struggle against these financial attacks is a core issue of the offensive against modern anticommunism.

12. There is no party in Germany whose organization is as cohesive and unified as that of the MLPD. The unanimous approval of the Report of the Central Committee, of the Report of the CCC, and of the actions of the comrades in charge of finances also showed this.

While the opportunists sing the blues, have adjustment problems and indulge in nostalgia, the MLPD banks on principled, forward-looking, successful party-building. Inventive and dedicated party-building in interrelation with the promotion of the self-run organizations of the masses will be the guideline for the countrywide participation of the MLPD in the 2013 federal elections. This is about the all-around unfolding and sustained extension and strengthening of the system of our patient rank-and-file work. To this end the Ninth Party Congress made a discriminating and thorough evaluation and generalization of the ample experience of the last few years.

13. Without glossing anything over, the Party Congress also discussed still existing problems such as in Marxist-Leninist alliance work, Marxist-Leninist environmental work, etc., and pointed ways to their solution. This congress was not an exercise in self-glorification, as we know it from the party congresses of the Berlin monopoly parties. It was a Party Congress of principled criticism and self-criticism and creative and comradely discussion. This, on the basis of deep mutual respect and unswerving solidarity, was the source of its great orientation to the future and its confidence in victory. One international guest summed up the content and spirit of the discussions in the words: "The Party Congress showed that the MLPD is on the verge of taking a great leap forward."

14. The successful development of the party builds upon the firm foundation of theoretical work and a process of the ideological-political maturation of the party. The publication of Revolutionärer Weg, Nos. 32–34, Strategy and Tactics of the International Socialist Revolution, after 19 years of preparatory work was followed by an outstanding study movement which encompassed the entire party and many of our friends. This is a guarantee that the party has learned to hold its course even in complicated and sometimes turbulent times.

15. Critically and self-critically, the Stuttgart Party Congress discussed the stagnation of membership growth. It was due above all to the crisis-damping policy and the campaign of modern anticommunism during the past years. As conclusion from this the Party Congress determined that, starting immediately, the focus of the MLPD's organizational policy must be the work among youth as mass tactics of party-building in combination with proletarian internationalism. Win youth, win the future!

The Party Congress stated that the conditions exist for realizing this mass tactics:
Owing to the successful criticism and self-criticism campaign on youth work, the party's work among youth has experienced an upswing. Rebell and Red Foxes have made good progress. This finds expression in the close cohesion between MLPD, Rebell and Red Foxes. In the elections for the central bodies it became clear that Rebell has begun again to become the main reservoir of the MLPD.

16. The Party Congress attained a high cultural level and underscored the importance of proletarian culture for the unity of thinking, feeling and acting. Mastery of the dialectical method at the level of the doctrine of the mode of thinking and of systemic thinking proved to be the key to the advances and the key to providing the future answers to the burning questions of our time. The developed proletarian culture of debate practiced by the Party Congress, in particular the large number of contributions presented "off the cuff," show that the conscious application of the dialectical method has become the common thread running through all party work.

17. With impressive unanimity the Party Congress confirmed the work done by the Eighth Central Committee, the Eighth Central Control Commission, and the Eighth Central Auditing Commission. At the same time, the Central Committee experienced a renewal through a number of younger comrades and above all women comrades. The large pool of nominees for the elections stood for the vitality of the party and the outstanding development of its cadres as a solid foundation for future growth and as a guarantee for the accomplishment of the great future tasks of the party. There were 33 percent more nominees than could be elected to the CC; 84 percent of the newly elected CC members are of proletarian class situation; 34 percent are women, and the average age of the CC comrades is 48.

The Stuttgart Party Congress calls on all members of MLPD and Rebell and all friends:

Let us unfold an offensive against modern anticommunism and for genuine socialism!

Let us make the federal election campaign a major initiative devoted to party-building!

The MLPD will anchor itself among the masses as "radical left," "revolutionary" and advocate of a genuine "socialist alternative"!

Forward with the MLPD to the party of the masses and with Rebell to the mass youth league!

Workers of all countries, unite!

Workers of all countries and all oppressed, unite!

Forward with ICOR!

Forward with the preparation of the international socialist revolution!