For many workers across Britain over the past century, the Labour Party has represented their aspirations for a better life and fairer, more humane society.

A declining number have believed that Labour in government would or even should legislate for a transition from capitalism to socialism, from a system of rule by big business to one of rule by the working class and the people generally.

The experience of majority as well as minority Labour governments in the 20th and early 21st centuries has dispelled most such illusions on the left.

For decades, the Communist Party in Britain used to envisage a "Labour government of a new type" playing a central role in the revolutionary transformation of society. More recent editions of the party's programme Britain's Road to Socialism have projected instead the need for a militant movement and mass campaigning to secure the election of a "left-wing government at Westminster, based on a socialist, Labour, communist and progressive majority at the polls."

This would mark the culmination of the first stage in the revolutionary process in Britain, complemented by the election of left governments in Wales and Scotland based on a similar anti-monopoly alliance of forces led by the labour movement.

Many on the left in Britain broadly agree with this perspective, whatever their view of the Communist Party and other parts of its programme.

Others continue to fantasise about Britain hosting a replay of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, or Scotland taking a separate Cuban-style road to socialism.

When not infiltrating the Labour Party, they are usually to be found denouncing any involvement with it, although most sections of the labour movement have not even considered what the alternative might be.

The Communist Party, on the other hand, is clear that the labour movement - and in particular the trade unions - must have its own mass electoral party which is capable of winning general elections, forming a government and enacting reforms in the interests of the working-class majority of the people.

Workers and their families need, want and expect such a party.

It could play a vital role in representing, inspiring, politicising and - especially at election time - mobilising people on a mass scale. This would be part of the preparation for the transition to the next stage in the struggle for socialism, whereby a militant mass movement and its left government challenges the economic and state power of the monopoly capitalist class.

Is tomorrow's Labour Party, in which the trade unions are no longer able or willing to exercise decisive collective influence, likely to perform such a role? That prospect will recede significantly when the Collins proposals are passed at this year's Labour Party conferences.

Britain's Road to Socialism explains that it has been that party's affiliated federal structure and its trade union and working-class composition that have ensured the existence of a significant socialist trend within it. It is this structure and composition which is now being put in mortal jeopardy.

Of course, it's not impossible that the unions could rally and renew the fight with greater intensity to reclaim what used to be their party. But from the 1990s onwards, they have helped put the very anti-democratic obstacles in place that would make victory much more difficult.

In the meantime, the fragmentation of the labour movement's political unity is likely to continue. New left parties and electoral alliances will proliferate, falter and reappear in new guises. More trade unionists and even some unions will withdraw from active participation in the Labour Party.

With this danger in mind, the Communist Party threw down a challenge to the labour movement in its Open Letter to Workers, Trade Unionists and Socialists in 2012 (and updated the following year). We urged the unions to take specific action to step up the struggle to reclaim the Labour Party.

Some did but have now capitulated to Ed Miliband, the new Labourites and - for all the good it will do - the anti-trade union, Tory press.

We also warned in the Open Letter that "should the Labour Party continue on a right-wing course, its future will be at risk and the trade union movement will have to re-establish a mass party of labour" for the purposes outlined above.

Labour's election manifesto and the record of the first year of any Labour government in 2015-16 will decide whether the task of re-establishing such a party must supplant that of reclaiming the Labour Party.

A rising tide of industrial and campaigning action would make the choice all the starker and more practical.

Even so, the debate about how best to resolve the crisis of working-class political representation cannot be postponed for yet another year. Anyway, it has already begun formally in some unions and, informally, among other union activists.

Striving for greater clarity, understanding and agreement across the labour movement needs to proceed now, before problems of demoralisation, fragmentation and division worsen.

Engaging big trade union battalions in this discussion will be vital for progress. The crisis will not be resolved by narrow electoral and political formations in which sectarian or ultra-leftist elements wield a disproportionate influence.

Instead, we need trade union bodies at every level - up to and including the Trades Union Congress - to organise discussions, meetings and conferences to consider how many more workers and their families can be drawn into political activity and representation.

Hand in hand with this effort must go the drive to popularise the ideas and concept of socialism. Tony Benn has often pointed out that our problem in Britain is not a shortage of socialist parties but of socialists.

The essential role played by socialists in the general and industrial unions, as well as through Keir Hardie's Independent Labour Party, in the formation of the Labour Representation Committee (forerunner of the party) in February 1900 is often overlooked.

Today, we need more socialists in order to reclaim the labour movement for socialism, as the pre-condition for the labour movement reclaiming or re-establishing its mass party.

None of this negates the need, too, for a much stronger Communist Party in Britain.

On the contrary, a bigger and more influential Communist Party, non-sectarian and rooted in the labour movement, active on every front of the political class struggle, unwavering in its commitment to socialism, guided by Marxist theory and imbued with internationalism, is essential for rebuilding labour's mass party and advancing towards socialism.

Rob Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.