“VOTE LABOUR where no communist is standing” has been the default electoral policy of the Communist Party for the last 75 years.

No more. The report of a speech delivered by party general secretary Rob Griffiths at a recent meeting of the political committee indicates that this long-standing position no longer applies in the prevailing political situation.

Rather, the party rightly anticipates that Labour will be challenged by a diverse range of forces to its left at future elections, and many of those will be worthy of support in preference to Keir Starmer’s candidates.

The party has yet to elaborate on this change in a longer explanatory article. But it is a significant development.

Of course, this must be qualified. It cannot be pretended that masses of voters have been swayed by the party’s advice for decades now, no more than they have been persuaded to back its own candidates, alas.

And in reality, the party’s electoral interventions have been more nuanced than the “vote Labour where no Communist stands” line implies.

For example, at the last general election, the party indicated support for some left-of-Labour candidates and moreover called for no vote for the leading figures in what was then the shadow cabinet, whether they were opposed by a communist or not. There are other, earlier, examples too.

Nevertheless, if the judgement of the main political organisation, historically, of British Marxists, a party always embedded in the labour movement, is changing on a matter of such substance, it is a resonant moment.

It speaks to political realities at both strategic and contingent levels. To understand the strategic level, it is necessary to review the reasons for the traditional Communist position in the first place.

Before the second world war, the Communist Party adopted a variety of electoral positions, dependent largely on the prevailing strategies of the Communist International, although the extent to which Labour left space for Communists to operate within its own ranks was also a factor.

The shift to supporting Labour everywhere except where a Communist was standing from the 1950s on had a deep congruity with class politics. It turned on the fact that Labour was the party of the broader labour movement, resting above all on the affiliation of most major trade unions.

Union votes dominated Labour’s conference, their funds its treasury and their branches parliamentary candidate selections by-and-large.

This was compromised by the political hegemony of the right-wing, pro-imperialist parliamentary leadership, by the frustration of its foundational federal structure through the exclusion of the Communist Party and the very limited perspectives of most union leaderships most of the time.

Nevertheless, this reformist hegemony rested on the acquiescence of the unions, and since unions themselves remained largely democratic working-class bodies, their transformation from below could find further articulation within the Labour Party, albeit not without overcoming considerable further obstacles.

This gave Labour a Janus-like nature — a party of the masses in its constitution, and of the bourgeois state in the execution. It was, in the Gramscian dialectic, a site of struggle. More prosaically, it was a class party, even if a compromised one, in a national political binary corresponding to the demarcations of class struggle.

And so it was until perhaps 30 years or so ago (hindsight fully operative here). The changes wrought by New Labour have proven to be enduring, partly because they chimed with the thrust of a neoliberal globalisation that was incrementally liquidating both labour organisation in first-wave capitalist countries and the basis for traditional social democratic programmes.

Trade unions, and particularly Labour’s main blue-collar affiliates, lost industrial purchase and influence in society at large, which a Blair leadership sharing many of Thatcherism’s attitudes was not concerned to restore.

Thus, the Labour Party was transformed to the point where the unions could no longer change its policy direction even if they wished to, and its activists were more often ignored or excluded when it came to parliamentary selections. Fewer union branches engaged with the party at the constituency level. And the rich met any deficit in Labour’s funding requirements.

When the major unions united to force progressive resolutions through Labour conference late in the New Labour years, Blair and Brown simply ignored them without consequence.

Starmer, following the Blair-era playbook, turbocharged these tendencies, masked solely by a willingness to engage in employment law reform more generously than New Labour.

By-and-large, unions have unenthusiastically accepted this marginalisation, still calculating that staying on the right side of Labour’s leaders would yield better rewards than continued Tory rule. Not wrong in itself.

Yet here, the nature of Labour rule becomes the most relevant factor. Since the Callaghan cabinet dismissed Tony Benn’s drive for an alternative economic strategy in 1976, a landmark in Britain’s post-war political history, we have had 17 years of Labour government.

They have been years of anti-socialist, anti-working-class rule driven by the needs of finance capital and pronounced servility to imperialism, without the countervailing element of that organic connection to the wider labour movement which prevailed two generations and more in the past.

Under those circumstances, the ordinary working-class voter can only regard the traditional argument that Labour is the “political wing” of an integral labour movement as a matter of theology with little, if any, practical relevance.

Labour is as Labour does, and you would now have to be past state retirement age to remember a Labour government genuinely open to working-class influence on its general direction.

So it makes little sense to continue to style Labour a “trade union party.” Only the vestiges adhere. In 1989, then-leader Neil Kinnock told a Transport and General Workers’ Union conference that “in so many ways, it is the Labour Party.”

No leader today would dream of saying the same thing about the T&G’s successor, Unite, nor would the union leadership welcome it if they did.

It is true that Labour in opposition, as it has been for most of the last half-century, is a more dynamic story — but one of limited interest to the suffering public. Pro-socialist inclinations have been firmly expunged long before a Labour leader opens the door to Downing Street, in 1997 and 2024 alike.

And so to the present, and Starmer’s government maintaining full continuity with policy set by the City, Nato and Washington, defying its manifesto pledge of “change” and enforcing its edicts with a regime of inner-party authoritarianism with few historic parallels.

A new government of austerity and war, in a deteriorating international situation, after 17 years of economic slump and stagnation, unable to confront crises from genocide to climate change to housing shortages and preparing the way for far-right rule, would warrant sustained opposition from the left under any circumstances.

Today, that opposition emerges from the recognition that today’s Labour Party is not a plausible vehicle for the attainment of socialism, and it is not even a moderately decent government. It draws on immense movements of solidarity with the Palestinians, 15 years of capitalist crisis, the legacy of Corbynism and anti-austerity mobilisation.

That is the broad politics, but the form and focus of any challenge remain moot, with no guarantee of any common conclusion emerging.

It is possible, although not desirable, that there will be a diversity of left and independent challenges to Labour at the next election, sharing a broadly common agenda but not a “brand” or national leadership.

One issue informing next steps must be that much of the left remains within the Labour Party, with roots but presently no real strategy. How will they be appealed to and collaborated with?

Another must be the electoral strength of the Greens, parked on at least a slice of the left-of-labour vote. Can there — should there — be some form of pact? Without it, electoral results will be more meagre than otherwise.

Must an alternative be explicitly socialist? How sharply should Labour be attacked? How centralised should it be, given the successful pre-existing locally rooted initiatives?

A lot of questions, some of them painful to address. Having made the leap in principle, the Communist Party’s strategic capacity will surely be helpful in securing productive resolutions.

Of course, there will be opposition to any departure from long-cherished verities. But in the words of the singer: “Please heed the call/ Don’t stand in the doorway/ Don’t block up the hall/ For he that gets hurt/ Will be he who has stalled/ The battle outside raging/ Will soon shake your windows/ And rattle your walls.”

If ever there were a moment for shaking windows and rattling walls, it is now.