Quote of the issue

James Connolly on the monarchy

To this day, the British monarchy remains a rallying point for reaction and would provide a figurehead for a military takeover should the bourgeoisie feel the need to repress a proletarian challenge to its class rule. Writing in 1897 on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Irish socialist James Connolly stressed that working-class opposition to the British crown was central to the task of fighting to overthrow capitalist rule. Connolly was executed for his part in leading the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland.

Home Rule orators and Nationalist Lord Mayors, Whig politicians and Parnellite pressmen, have ere now lent their prestige and influence to the attempt to arouse public interest in the sickening details of this Feast of Flunkeyism. It is time then that some organised party in Ireland — other than those in whose mouths Patriotism means Compromise, and Freedom, High Dividends — should speak out bravely and honestly the sentiments awakened in the breast of every lover of freedom by this ghastly farce now being played out before our eyes. Hence the Irish Socialist Republican Party — which, from its inception, has never hesitated to proclaim its unswerving hostility to the British Crown, and to the political and social order of which in these islands that Crown is but the symbol — takes this opportunity of hurling at the heads of all the courtly mummers who grovel at the shrine of royalty the contempt and hatred of the Irish Revolutionary Democracy. We, at least, are not loyal men; we confess to having more respect and honour for the raggedest child of the poorest labourer in Ireland to-day than for any, even the most virtuous, descendant of the long array of murderers, adulterers and madmen who have sat upon the throne of England….

The working class alone have nothing to hope for save in a revolutionary reconstruction of society; they, and they alone, are capable of that revolutionary initiative which, with all the political and economic development of the time to aid it, can carry us forward into the promised land of perfect Freedom, the reward of the agelong travail of the people.

— James Connolly, “Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897”, printed in James Connolly, Collected Works, Volume One (New Books Publications, 1987)