This Saturday and Sunday, delegates will be gathering at Liverpool ACC’s conference centre to discuss the founding of a new party. Four months ago, Zarah Sultana announced the formation of Your Party declaring, “We’re not an island of strangers.” By the end of August, 800,000 people had joined a contact list. Things have gone badly since then, with each of the two potential leaders, Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, threatening their opponent with legal action. Each sits in Parliament as members of a six-strong contingent of MPs, the Independent Alliance. In the summer, all of those MPs were expected to join the new party. As of today, two have resigned, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed – more would be no surprise. When critics say this weekend’s conference is make a break for Your Party – they’re right.

That said, I’m an optimist. As a member of Islington Community Independents, one of two nascent Your Party group in our constituency, I know quite a few people who have been sortitioned and will be there. Listening to them as conference comes closer my best guess is that Your Party will survive.

The task facing delegates this weekend is to find a way of working together across certain divides. On social media, the issues which have cleaved Zarah Sultana and other Your Party MPs apart have been the same ones which have split the left so often since the Brexit referendum: renters versus homeowners, support for open borders, whether your support for trans rights extends so far as to adopting policies that might resist the present backlash. Those are longstanding and generational dividing lines. But what outsiders don’t see about the left is the thousands of organisations that just get on. We find ways to co-operate across those fault lines. Trade unions, housing campaigns, anti-war and anti-racist groups have a very long tradition of grasping the principled position which keeps everyone you need in the room.

There are moments when unity is harder. One of them is where an organisation has a leadership contest. Choosing between rival candidates means thinking which of their platforms suit you better (although one of the tragedies of the Sultana/Corbyn conflict is how unwilling each has been to spell out their differences).

There are also time when unity is easier. Left politics works when people are involved in practical task, organising a protest, building the sinews of a party. If you want to persuade someone to take more left-wing positions on these key questions, it is far easier to do so if you are talking to them in action – if you are binding over some kind of joing activity – rather than looking to build an audience online.

Eighty years ago, George Orwell’s Animal Farm put the point well. What everyone remembers about the book is the part played by the leaders of the revolt, Snowball and Napoleon. Of the two leaders, Snowball is there from the start, but he is undermined by his rival Napoleon, who exiles him then turns him into a symbol of all that the animals are still fighting against. At the end of the novel, Napoleon and his allies have won. They sit down again with their humans; they’ve become the enemy they once fought. There is however, in the same book, a path not taken. Its representative is Boxer, the cart-horse, who never falters in face of the challenge of building the farm. Set any task, he works through it. That instinct doesn’t always do Boxer much good, but the one moment of real tragedy in the novel comes when Boxer dies. Readers care for him because we’ve all met people like that in real life. We know that any cause is likely to attract around itself people who give to the movement and people who take. And, in any healthy movement, it’s the former who predominate.

The reason why the last four months have been so toxic in Your Party is, through all that time, there has been an undeclared contest between the two camps around Corbyn and Sultana. The allies of the two potential leaders can argue as long as they back about which one of them is Snowball and which Napoleon, I doubt most members of the party care. They want us to build a party, to find an audience for it, to persuade other people that socialiusm could work.

(Incidentally, while the press have been desperate to explain the clashes in terms of the bad faith of far-left groups, very few – FRFI is the one exception – have been playing a destructive role. Those who’ve never seen the SWP in an election alliance would be astonished at quite how willing they are to play the role of uncritical backers of whoever wins the Your Party leadership. And the same is true of Counterfire, the Communist Party, etc. You need to go quite a long way down the list before you meet anyone who notices what positions YP adopts or cares about the party’s politics).

Since the summer, very few Your Party groups have pressed on with practical tasks of organising: getting their groups registered with the Electoral Commission, interviewing candidates for next year’s local elections, putting them to a public vote. They have had precious little direction from the people around either candidates. Each camp has, in reality, played down the task of establishing local groups, postponing it to the future. They’ve concentrated instead on the factional struggle and leaking their version of the conflict to the press.

In a number of towns and cities, local activists have ignored the leadership contest and pressed on with local organising. Where people have done that – as we have in Islington, where we have slate of candidates, just waiting to go to a popular vote – we’ve enjoyed the experience. Activists who used to be in the Labour Party, the Greens, or come from far left backgrounds, along with many others who’ve never been involved in politics before, have forged a practical understanding. We are the people who’ll be at Liverpool; we need to raise our voices. If we can use the event to relegate both sets of egos, Your Party will flourish.