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	Workers Hammer No. 242	Summer 2018

Abolish the monarchy!

Harry foregoes swastika at wedding

The phrase “bread and circuses” — coined by the Roman satirist Juvenal — describes the means by which an exploiting class seeks to divert the plebs from thoughts of rebellion. While Britain’s capitalist rulers don’t bother much with the bread, royal births and weddings are milked for all they’re worth. In the latest royal circus, Prince Harry, whose most memorable previous exploit was to dress in Nazi regalia for a “natives and colonials” party, was married to mixed-race American actress Meghan Markle. Up to 1200 hand-picked “commoners” were allowed within the perimeter of Windsor Castle to join in the celebrations, although they were expected to bring their own food and drink.

The admittance of a black woman into the House of Windsor (now she’s got her visa sorted and been baptised in the Church of England) is absurdly presented by a fawning bourgeois media as the recasting of the feudal freak show that is the monarchy to be less “gammon” and more “woke”. One Guardian article (20 May) described the wedding as a “rousing celebration of blackness”; a black gospel choir sang and the black Episcopalian bishop Michael Curry began his sermon with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr and talked about the misery of slavery.

The British monarchy knows a thing or two about slavery — its empire was built in part on the trade in African men, women and children. Royal “tradition” is inextricably tied to the blood-soaked history of British colonial subjugation of countless millions of mainly dark-skinned people, a past that is still embodied in the British Commonwealth, with the monarch at its head. As the day of the wedding approached, images of the burnt-out shell of Grenfell Tower and the racist abuse of the “Windrush generation” of Commonwealth citizens offered stark reminders that capitalist Britain remains a racist hellhole.

For Prince Harry, posing as a Nazi was not merely “insensitive” youthful high jinks, as the media would have it. It is no accident that the authoritarianism of the jack-booted Nazi regime exerts an attraction on the monarchy. In 2015, the Sun made public a Windsor family home movie from the 1930s which showed the Queen’s mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, teaching the seven-year-old Elizabeth how to salute like a Nazi. Also seen giving the stiff-armed salute was the future Edward VIII, the Queen’s uncle, who was notorious for his Nazi sympathies and friendship with Adolf Hitler.

Thus does the House of Windsor (formerly House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, before the anti-German sentiment whipped up during World War I mandated a name change) express in unvarnished fashion the haughty contempt of the British imperialist ruling class for working-class people and the rulers’ feelings of racial superiority over their former colonial slaves. The royal family remains the embodiment of the reactionary “United Kingdom”, which incorporates the Orange statelet in Northern Ireland and rests on English domination over the Scottish and Welsh nations. The monarchy’s linchpin role in the United Kingdom is captured by the fact that Harry was not only made Duke of Sussex but was also given newly minted Scottish and Northern Irish titles: Earl of Dumbarton and Baron Kilkeel.

The role of the monarchy at the pinnacle of British imperialism is far from simply ornamental. The monarchy is a potential rallying point for reaction in times of social crisis, when the bourgeoisie feels its rule threatened. It is not to Parliament but to the Queen that the armed forces swear allegiance. In his 1925 work Where is Britain going? Leon Trotsky, co-leader with VI Lenin of the Russian Revolution, noted that Labour MPs of the day voted in Parliament to give funds to the Prince of Wales for an overseas tour. Trotsky sharply observed: “How can they assault bourgeois property if they dare not refuse pocket money to the Prince of Wales?”

This is the tradition upheld by Jeremy Corbyn. While he is constantly goaded by the Tories and the Blairites in his own party for being insufficiently obsequious to the monarchy, Corbyn was nonetheless among those offering his congratulations to “Harry and Meghan”. As he prepares for office in the hallowed halls of Westminster, Corbyn’s lifelong republicanism has gone the same way as his longstanding opposition to the European Union. In an interview with the New Statesman (30 July 2015), Corbyn was asked “Would you abolish the monarchy?” His response was: “Listen, I am at heart, as you very well know, a republican. But it’s not the fight I’m going to fight: it’s not the fight I’m interested in.”

We Marxist revolutionaries take inspiration from an altogether different tradition. Oliver Cromwell and the 17th century bourgeois revolutionaries overthrew the feudal order and chopped off the head of Charles I. A workers revolution would have as its first task sweeping away all the feudal crap of the past. Our model is the Bolshevik party which led the workers and peasants of the Russian tsarist empire in sweeping away the capitalist and landlord exploiters, in the process extinguishing Tsar Nicholas II’s Romanov dynasty — relatives of Prince Philip.

When asked to describe the political philosophy of the Queen Mother, one royal secretary quoted the words of the hymn “All things bright and beautiful”: “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate — God made them high and lowly and order’d their estate” (Guardian, 15 September 2009). The continued existence of feudal relics such as the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established churches is indeed an assertion that social privilege, vast inequality and rigid social hierarchy are simply the “natural” order. These institutions are an affront to the working class and to elementary democratic principles.