By Phil Shannon
The world's richest woman is about to disgrace our shores again. Royalty worshippers are ecstatic. Australian republicans and socialists, on the other hand, hold no brief for these "people of the past" (as Trotsky called them).
Republicans take the monarchy and its abolition seriously, but most socialists tend to regard the monarchy as irrelevant — a tedious anachronism to be mocked or a mere symbol of the unequal distribution of wealth.
The Great Feudal Relics Show, however, is not simply a harmless pageant of a caste-ridden, horse-riding bunch of upper class twits. The monarchy is an ideological, and on occasions a real political, impediment to social change.
The royals are presented as the epitome of conservative moral rectitude, the living exemplars of the respectable, heterosexual family. Although Queen Victoria (who reigned from 1837 to 1901) never assented to legislation criminalising lesbianism, this was because she refused to believe it existed. George V (1910-1936 and first head of the Windsor dynasty) thought that the honourable thing for male homosexuals to do was to shoot themselves.
What we don't hear, however, is that George I (1714-1727) locked his wife up for 32 years for adultery whilst he had three mistresses himself. George II (1727-1760) committed "numerous infidelities". George III (1760-1820) locked his sister in a castle for life. George IV (1820-1830) was a bigamist.
The Windsors have, as far as we know, straightened out their moral hypocrisy, but their political ethics remain foully reactionary. George V was pals with the autocratic Tsar Nicholas. Edward VIII (1936) swapped fascist thoughts with Hitler. The queen mother was an enthusiastic supporter of the bloodletting racist Ian Smith in Rhodesia.
Prince Philip, when in Paraguay, remarked to the dictator of that country (and protector of surviving Nazis), General Stroessner, that it "was a pleasant change to be in a country that isn't ruled by its people" and "where the government decides what's to be done, and it's done".
The queen, who feted the monster Ceausescu in 1978, has pronounced on the virtues of defeating the British miners' strike of 1984-85 and the defence of oil profits in Iraq. After the murder of 14 protesters in Derry in 1972 by her army, she awarded an OBE to the commanding officer who had ordered what was called by the Derry City coroner "sheer unadulterated murder". Prince Chuck pretends to be a bit of a liberal maverick, speaking platitudes on the environment (whilst hunting foxes) and inner-city poverty. The rest of the medieval menagerie are just vacuous.
Behind the "human face" of the monarchy lies an undemocratic and violent state which the capitalist media try to disguise with adulatory prose, hushed awe and reverential treatment of the of apprentice kings and queens. As the great republican democrat Thomas Paine put it, "Monarchy would not have continued so many ages in the world, had it not been for the abuses it protects. It is the master-fraud, which shelters all others."
Paine added that the common people, who ought to be sovereign citizens instead of the queen's "subjects", are treated as "a herd of beings that must be governed by fraud, effigy and show".
The royal family embody the "inevitability" of minority rule — "The king is dead, long live the king". As English as cricket, theirs is, they hope, a never-ending innings. Currently padded up to go in next wicket down is Charles, who will be the 67th monarch to bat in an innings that has lasted over 1060 years. Only once, in the 17th century, has their stay at the crease been interrupted when capitalist republicans under Oliver Cromwell vanquished feudal power in the 1642 revolution. They executed Charles I in 1649 but declared after a few overs and restored a (somewhat weakened) monarchy in 1660.
The limited though real political power the monarchy possesses is used to preserve the unjust distribution of power and wealth. At the Australian democracy championships in 1975, it was the unelected governor-general, the queen's (and CIA's) representative in Australia, who dismissed the Whitlam government. Although a capital strike and an anti-Labor media did all the spadework, assisted by the timidity of Whitlam and Hawke (no anti-royal George Washingtons these), it was Kerr who gave the final flick to an elected government.
It is important to knock down ideologically the high and mighty expensive parasites because what they stand for — the family, privilege, unequal wealth, minority rule — lies at the heart of the system run by the high and mighty with real economic and political power, the capitalist class.
Capitalism can, of course, survive without its royal sideshow (the US does quite nicely) but whilst we've got them in Australia, it is up to socialists to make opposition to them also a fight against the robbers' system they symbolise.
The last ALP national conference, which announced its intention to introduce a referendum to make Australia a republic by 2001, did not have this wider goal in mind, but we can take our stand with the English socialist William Morris, who, wrote of the 1887 Jubilee of Queen Victoria and its display of luxury in the midst of poverty that "one's indignation swells pretty much to the bursting point". We should turn this indignation to other targets of the capitalist economy which systematically rip off much more than the $1.6 million the queen's visit is costing us.
Any move to make Australia a republic should be supported to eliminate some undemocratic features of bourgeois democracy like the governor-general. The current "movement" headed by Donald Horne and Thomas Keneally, however, is limited to these reforms and, with its class-blind nationalism, can indeed become a diversion from a struggle against real, Australian, capitalist power.
Bob Ansett and other business barons are supporters of the current republican movement. Republicanism was revolutionary 18th century, when the English king had real power, but the capitalist class (whose days of revolutionary opposition to feudalism are long gone) now runs the joint. In a capitalist republic Wall Street is king.
Questioning the monarchy does have the potential to bring into question everything that the queen represents — from British occupation of Ireland to conspicuous, unearned, inherited and untaxed wealth, to the effects of her majesty's colonisation of Australia on Aborigines, to the whole rotten undemocratic organisation of capitalist society. A campaign against the monarchy is an important part of the ideological struggle for socialism.