WASN’T it Karl Marx who said: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of left-wing political parties?” Well, no, it wasn’t.

Marx recognised and proclaimed that societies’ histories have been and are “the history of class struggle” — and though many socialists nod profoundly in agreement with him, too many of them in fact remain wedded to the wishful-thinking idealist notion that the road to the next stage in the development of society — the socialist stage — is a parliamentary road ... playing what is effectively a game of anti-capitalism using the capitalist system’s rules.

Of course, it would be a real bonus, come the next election, to have an opportunity to vote for something half decent. But, in fact, world history is littered with the dying and decaying remains of parties that offered themselves as a route out of exploitation and oppression, only to succumb to, or be crushed by, the state machine of the ruling class of exploiters and oppressors. Labour is the latest for us in Britain.

But, is the answer to go on reinventing the wheel in the hope that, this time, our latest version won’t be bent out of recognition, punctured and shattered by the state’s destructive devices embedded in the political rocky road they have prepared for us.

Of course, we, as a class, need a mass-membership political party, but it must be one that arises directly out of, and is created directly by the protagonist organisations and leaders of resurgent working-class struggle ... to be the servant of that struggle — no more and no less.

It must not be seen or promoted as a replacement of that day-in-day-out struggle. It must not be the trophy-party for which the many messiahs of the left will inevitably engage in a life-and-death struggle for control, while the ruling class use their power to undermine and destroy it.

So we could say that we should “wait and see” whether any new party quickly creates the internal environment that not only encourages working-class organisations, fighters and leaders not only to join it, but which directly and deliberately turns its leadership, structures, policy, strategy, action and parliamentary candidates, over to those class forces ... rather than to the figures of the professional parliamentary left — no matter how attractive and charismatic they may be, or may have been in previous political lives.

The former might give it a good chance of making progress — the latter would prepare it as a rebellious sacrificial lamb to the ruthless God of Capital.

But much better than “wait and see” is “analyse and act.” Britain is right now on a slippery path to fascism and war. These are realities, not fears. There is no time to lose — and much has been lost already.

The immediate priority is to bring together a “coalition of the willing” of our own — a united front of all those bona fide working-class and progressive campaigning organisations that have been proven in action over recent years and decades.

A united front that recognises that the crises of transnational monopoly capitalism are the toxic ground which throws up the poisonous weeds of poverty, mega-profits, superexploitation, climate disaster, racism and misogyny, oppressive laws, fascism and war.

It is from the strong and secure foundations of the experience in action of building such a united front that a new party could really emerge that would directly reflect and serve the working-class movement, rather than trying to control or replace it.

The ruling class would find it much more difficult to successfully combat a party built out of the material experience of real class struggle — Marx’s motor of society — than they would a new party patched together from the flimsy fabric of parliamentarianism.