LET US hope that Your Party — now emerging more or less intact from its founding conference — will swiftly establish local structures, develop a lively internal democracy alongside an active intervention in working-class communities and workplaces around the issues which concern working people.

There is an enormous desire for a politics which puts working-class issues at the centre of debate and action.

There is a sense among working people that direct action in their sectional interests is both legitimate and desirable. Alongside this there is a clear understanding that when other groups of working people take action — just log on to strikemap.org to get a sense of where action is taking place — success is shared.

Where this sentiment lacks coherence and direction is where class politics comes in, and if Your Party becomes the place where this is concentrated then we can think of the working class in Britain going beyond being a class in itself. A class not just bound by a common understanding and goals but becoming a class for itself in the sense that it begins to acquire the organisational, ideological and political attributes that give it the heft to tackle its class enemies.

The old saw has it that capitalists are more class conscious than the working class. People on the left tend to think of class consciousness as a problem of the working class but other classes also have a sense of their own position in society.

We are familiar with the Countryside Alliance, which expresses the interests of rural property owners and the subaltern elements they can draw into their sense of place and position.

We have seen how private haulage contractors — sometimes medium or large firms but often just a man tied to a truck and a bank loan — can see their interests as antagonistic to other groups of people or even society as a whole.

Significantly for our present politics is how our ruling class has been divided over membership of the European Union and how the most powerful and dominant section of big business and the banks lost out to the upstart stratum presently assembled around Reform UK.

The Brexit referendum showed the potency of the British working class when it sees a vote that counts for something. The referendum gave agency to working people, and this accounts both for the increased turnout and the sharp class delineation of the vote.

If Your Party allows itself to be diverted into the swamp of illusions about the EU that allowed Keir Starmer to capture the leadership of Labour from Jeremy Corbyn then it will dig an unbridgeable ditch between itself and the main centres of working-class Britain.

Fail to listen to working-class voices and credibility vanishes. Labour’s most recent abandonment of its manifesto commitment to give workers protection from unfair dismissal from day one is the latest example of the government’s tone-deaf approach, and Your Party needs to keep its ears tuned to what workers actually think and say.

One of the weaknesses of Momentum, and of Labour under Corbyn, was its lack of organisation in the working-class areas most affected by the disintegration of the traditional capitalist economy of production. Very welcome was the entry of masses of young people and the post-student world of the underpaid, overexploited “generation rent,” but it is undeniable that this stratum carries with it a set of assumptions that do not always sit comfortably with working-class communities of various kinds.

It is not simply a question of identity politics versus class politics or attitudes to social conservatism but of respect for human experience.

Your Party conference saw some unfocused debates on these themes, a lack of precision and a preponderance of highly rehearsed speeches from people easily identified as representing particular factional interests.

We can say with some confidence that the working class in Britain has largely given up on the idea that electing a Labour government is the clearest route to meeting its basic demands.

If the new and now explicitly socialist Your Party — constitutionally committed to the working class as the main signifier of its identity — is to be decisive in winning a government ruling for working people, it needs to break with Labour’s submission to the bond markets and the entire edifice of institutions in which capital entrusts its interests over those of working people.

Your Party seems to have settled, for the moment, the outstanding questions about the structure of its leadership and membership.

It looks like the bid to exclude the various semi-Trotskyist groups failed, not least because of the bureaucratic way in which the anonymous powers-that-be tried to enforce it.

While the dangers of gifting the fractious a free-fire zone are obvious, there are no overriding questions of principle here save that of unity.

Labour, when it was originally constituted, was a federation of affiliated trade unions, socialist societies and separately constituted parties, including the main Marxist trends from which the Communist Party emerged.

It was only after the defeat of the 1926 General Strike and the ensuing demoralisation and retreat that the right wing succeeded in driving the communists out of the Labour Party while the various right-wing societies, like the Fabians, maintained their link and ideological influence.

The entire history of the Labour Party, in opposition and government, has been one of constant tension between a class-collaborationist trend tied to the main strategies of the ruling class and a constellation of forces resisting in practice and theory this surrender to capitalist ideas.

Your Party has declared itself socialist in terms that suggest a sharp break from Labour and it has added to this an apparent opposition to membership of Nato and all that that implies.

In present circumstances, with the EU powers committed to war preparations against Russia, this is a sharp repudiation of a foundational policy of our ruling class, presently most ferociously upheld by the Starmer government.

Labour’s federal structure, essentially as the parliamentary representation of the organised working class, gave it — and still gives it — a stability and reach into the working class that no other formation possesses. Your Party does not have this yet and thus a structure which permits joint membership with other organisations opens up a flank to possible disruption without the institutional power and stability that union affiliation offers.

Of course, the predominance of class collaborationist ideas in unions, immediately apparent in the consent given by some to the abandonment of employment rights on day one, brings its own problems.

Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system means a credible mass party of socialism will be a magnet for any formation that lacks the weight or credibility to pose an independent electoral challenge.

Your Party has given itself the constitutional power to decide whether members of other organisations may be individual members of Your Party. This is not the same as allowing the affiliation of such organisations on the original Labour Party model and this may yet be a valuable get-out clause should the parasitic tendencies prove to be a problem.

Nevertheless, we should guard against a blanket dismissal of the so-called ultra left as if it is an undifferentiated whole.

The decisive moment for such outfits was firstly the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Europe. Some welcomed this in the mistaken expectation that with the “Stalinist” monolith dissolved their moment had arrived.

The global South experienced this as a setback, as did the many millions in the formerly socialist economies now open to neoliberalism. And far from the world communist movement disintegrating, it is increasingly decisive in many theatres of struggle.

The most sclerotic and sectarian elements in Britain’s ultra left collapsed into cults characterised by place-seeking, prestige politics, sexual scandals and flirtations with zionism and empire. But many understood the nature of the defeat and turned to the mass movements against neoliberalism, austerity and imperial war.

The peace movement and CND, Stop the War Coalition, the People’s Assembly against Austerity, united work in the trade unions, anti-racism broad fronts, serious theoretical work and, above all, the Palestine solidarity movement have created a broad milieu in which Your Party naturally finds its place.

All experience suggests that a mass party of the working class must be clear-sighted about its goals, coherent in its analysis of the capitalist society which it inhabits and organisationally united under clear leadership.

None of these flow inevitably from the decisions taken in a somewhat confused manner by the Your Party conference and it will take a big effort to make things work in the rough and tumble world of mass politics, class struggle and elections in Britain’s deeply undemocratic system.

Britain’s communists wish every success to Your Party and are open to every constructive proposal that strengthens the working-class movement. The party congress last month made absolutely clear its principled position that maintaining its political and organisational integrity is, at the same time, respecting that of Your Party.

The intensifying economic and political crisis of capitalism, especially its British variant, provides unending opportunities for united action and the Communist Party brings both a century and more of struggle plus an intimate connection with a world movement that has both won and lost political power.