Jeremy Corbyn’s new party could take inspiration from the ideas of Lenin, one of his closest advisers has said. James Schneider, who served as Labour’s director of strategic communications under Mr Corbyn, made the comments in an interview about the direction the new Left-wing movement, which was founded in July and has the working title of Your Party, could take. He told the New Left Review: “I’ve been working on this for about a year now, and I think there are structural factors which make it difficult to launch anything.” Mr Schneider said the party could initially be led by “a small group of closely aligned, politically advanced people, who can make decisions collectively”. He said: “There have been many communist parties throughout history, which have been formed by 12 or so individuals sitting around a table, which in short order became mass vehicles.” He also suggested that the party could take inspiration from Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, by thinking about what “Lenin today” might do. He told Oliver Eagleton, who interviewed him for the New Left Review: “You ran a short, thought-provoking piece by Dylan Riley the other week titled ‘Lenin in America’, which, following [Antonio] Gramsci, argued that Lenin today would pursue a ‘productive and creative relationship to the specific national-democratic revolutionary political culture in which one operates’. The British Left needs to be thinking along these lines.” Lenin established the world’s first communist state in Russia in 1917 as head of the Bolshevik party. He overthrew the provisional government, established after the Tsar was ousted and made up of liberals and moderate socialists, in a military coup, and dismissed the democratically elected Constituent Assembly to impose one-party rule on the country. Lenin’s government indulged in state violence against its opponents, including the notorious “hanging order” in which Lenin told his revolutionary comrades to publicly execute no fewer than 100 rebels in each of the rebellious districts of Russia, referring to them as “the rich and the bloodsuckers”. Andrew Murray, another of Mr Corbyn’s former advisers, has also invoked Lenin when discussing the new party. In an interview with the New Left Review this week, he said: “As for Leninism: that requires a much higher degree of ideological militancy and unity from the outset than we are likely to get with this new party.” Mr Murray cited Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto when discussing the direction of the new party. He said: “The Communist Manifesto enjoins socialists to first of all organise the proletariat as a class – and this task clearly needs recapitulating. “The old organisations and institutions, both formal ones within the labour movement and informal ones within communities, have been broken apart over the past forty years. Reversing this, even partially, is an imperative for moving towards socialism.” Summarising his ambitions for the new party, Mr Schneider said: “My dream is a party that hits with the same impact as Turn the Page, the opening track on The Streets’ debut album Original Pirate Material. “Something you’ve never heard before, yet instantly recognisable; unmistakably British and rooted in everyday life, from the pubs to the pavements. “A sound – or in our case, a politics – that effortlessly blends cultures and traditions, anchored in class and community but moving forward with confidence and style. We need to inhabit this sort of national-popular register. “To put it in a more theoretical way, the efficacy of this kind of politics stems from unlocking the potential progressive valence of the ‘national’ dimension of the capital-nation-state triad.” Mr Schneider has given a number of interviews about the new venture and is understood to be involved in plans for the party’s future. He was a co-founder of the grassroots Left-wing group Momentum, which supported Mr Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. After leaving his position at the Labour party following its defeat at the 2019 general election, Mr Schneider became Communications Director at Progressive International, a global network of Left-wing activists. Mr Corbyn established his new party with Zarah Sultana, a former Labour MP who now sits as an independent. It was launched in July with the placeholder name Your Party. Members will decide its name at an inaugural conference in autumn.