From The Archives Of "Workers Hammer"-Revolutionary Socialist And Easter 1916 Uprising Leader James Connolly on royalty

Workers Hammer No. 215
Summer 2011

Quote of the issue

James Connolly on royalty

As an antidote to the barrage of obsequious drivel we were subjected to by the bourgeois media during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ireland in May, we reprint below an article by Irish socialist James Connolly on the occasion of the visit to Ireland by King George V in 1911. For his part in leading the 1916 Easter uprising against British rule in Ireland, Connolly was executed by his British captors.

Fellow-Workers,

As you are aware from reading the daily and weekly newspapers, we are about to be blessed with a visit from King George V.

Knowing from previous experience of Royal Visits, as well as from the Coronation orgies of the past few weeks, that the occasion will be utilised to make propaganda on behalf of royalty and aristocracy against the oncoming forces of democracy and National freedom, we desire to place before you some few reasons why you should unanimously refuse to countenance this visit, or to recognise it by your presence at its attendant processions or demonstrations. We appeal to you as workers, speaking to workers, whether your work be that of the brain or of the hand — manual or mental toil — it is of you and your children we are thinking; it is your cause we wish to safeguard and foster.

The future of the working class requires that all political and social positions should be open to all men and women; that all privileges of birth or wealth be abolished, and that every man or woman born into this land should have an equal opportunity to attain to the proudest position in the land. The Socialist demands that the only birthright necessary to qualify for public office should be the birthright of our common humanity.

Believing as we do that there is nothing on earth more sacred than humanity, we deny all allegiance to this institution of royalty, and hence we can only regard the visit of the King as adding fresh fuel to the fire of hatred with which we regard the plundering institutions of which he is the representative. Let the capitalist and landlord class flock to exalt him; he is theirs; in him they see embodied the idea of caste and class; they glorify him and exalt his importance that they might familiarise the public mind with the conception of political inequality, knowing well that a people mentally poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy necessary for the attainment of social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings — capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks. Thus coronation and king’s visits are by our astute never-sleeping masters made into huge Imperialist propagandist campaigns in favour of political and social schemes against democracy. But if our masters and rulers are sleepless in their schemes against us, so we, rebels against their rule, must never sleep in our appeal to our fellows to maintain as publicly our belief in the dignity of our class — in the ultimate sovereignty of those who labour.

What is monarchy? From whence does it derive its sanction? What has been its gift to humanity? Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the helplessness of the producer, and its gifts to humanity are unknown, save as they can be measured in the pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless iniquities.

Every class in society save royalty, and especially British royalty, has through some of its members contributed something to the elevation of the race. But neither in science, nor in art, nor in literature, nor in exploration, nor in mechanical invention, nor in humanising of laws, nor in any sphere of human activity has a representative of British royalty helped forward the moral, intellectual or material improvement of mankind. But that royal family has opposed every forward move, fought every reform, persecuted every patriot, and intrigued against every good cause. Slandering every friend of the people, it has befriended every oppressor. Eulogised to-day by misguided clerics, it has been notorious in history for the revolting nature of its crimes.

— James Connolly, “Visit of King George V, 1911”, printed in James Connolly, Collected Works, Volume One (New Books Publications, 1987)

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Down With the Monarchy and the “United Kingdom”!-For Workers Republics on Both Sides of the Irish Sea!-With James Connolly In Mind

Workers Vanguard No. 984
5 August 2011



For Workers Republics on Both Sides of the Irish Sea!

Down With the Monarchy and the “United Kingdom”!

We reprint below an article from Workers Hammer No. 215 (Summer 2011), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.

When the starving poor of Paris demanded bread, the haughty French Queen Marie Antoinette famously said “let them eat cake.” For British working people facing the deepest economic crisis since World War II, the equivalent is “give them a royal wedding.” Hardly had the hoopla subsided over the nuptials of William and Kate in April when the whole royal circus was re-enacted in the meticulously choreographed visit of Elizabeth II to Ireland a few weeks later.

A popular joke doing the rounds in the run-up to the royal wedding went along the lines of: “Prince William says he doesn’t want the traditional fruit cake at the wedding, but Prince Philip says he doesn’t give a toss and is going anyway.” Forever the butt of jokes due to his unstoppable, bigoted ravings on royal engagements, Prince Philip is often portrayed as a senile old reactionary in contrast to a reserved, reverential Her Majesty. But whatever comparable tact the Queen may display, Prince Philip’s outbursts are an unashamed expression of the racist, class contempt that is the institution of the monarchy.

David Cameron [Conservative prime minister] and his cabinet celebrated the announcement of the royal wedding last autumn with a banging of fists on the table in the manner of those educated in public schools [elite private schools], inculcated as they are with the arrogance that they are born to rule. For Cameron & Co., the event would be a “wedding of mass distraction” in which the population would fawn over the marriage of two pampered parasites and would put the devastating cuts and job losses to the back of their minds. But that is not quite how it turned out, as Polly Toynbee reported on the “big day” itself:

“Yet despite months of coverage, rising to a crescendo of print and broadcasting frenzy this week, the country has remained resolutely phlegmatic. Cameras pick out the wildest enthusiasts camped out or dressed as brides, yet the Guardian/ICM poll and others put those expressing ‘strong interest’ at only 20%.

“In poll after poll, more than 70% refused to be excited. Laconic, cool, only half the population said they would watch Friday’s flummery.”

—Guardian, 29 April

If there was little enthusiasm in England, Scotland and Wales showed even less excitement over the royal spectacle.

But we had to put up with it nonetheless: the absurd yet very real gossip about the Prince marrying a “commoner,” which says a lot about this country’s “in-your-face” class prejudice. Kate Middleton’s millionaire parents belong to the top 0.5 per cent income bracket and this “commoner” went to the same public school as the wives of the prime minister and the chancellor. In the eyes of the aristocracy, she is not high-born enough for her and her sibling to avoid the tag of “the wisteria sisters” in reference to their social climbing, or to avoid the “doors to manual” dig at her mother, a former airline stewardess. There was the endless bunting, the portrait of “Wills and Kate” emblazoned on the Union Jack—that butcher’s apron, the flag of an empire where “the sun never set” and the blood never dried and of the continued imperialist slaughter of Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya.

For those wanting to protest against the royal carnival, the message from Metropolitan Police Commander Christine Jones was that this could be deemed criminal. In a statement she declared, “this is a day of celebration, joy and pageantry” adding, “Any criminals attempting to disrupt it, be that in the guise of protest or otherwise, will be met by a robust, decisive, flexible and proportionate policing response.” In a suspension of democratic rights, dozens of people were barred from central London on the day of the wedding. Using the occasion as an excuse for a political clampdown, squats and social centres were raided.

Several student protesters were arrested and charged, including Alfie Meadows, the student who required brain surgery when he was struck down by police at a tuition fees protest in December. Scores of people were pre-emptively arrested in connection with the wedding, including several who were charged with “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” for planning activities such as a Right Royal Orgy event, a proposed piece of street theatre in London. The bourgeoisie were taking no chances with their feudal freak show. Some 5,000 police officers were part of the royal wedding security operation on the day, with 550 armed police put on a shoot-to-kill footing.

Abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established churches is an elementary democratic demand but one that is integral to a revolutionary programme in Britain. The continued existence of such feudal relics is an assertion that class privilege and vast inequality is part of the “natural” order of things in which each—“the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate”—has his place. We stand in the tradition of the English Revolutionaries of the 17th century who “turned the world upside down,” overthrowing the feudal order with the king at its head, and of the revolutionary Chartists in the 19th century who disdained to bow in awe before the monarchy and marched with pikes and muskets in their hands. Opposition to the monarchy as the pinnacle of the British class system is a precondition for building a party fit to overthrow capitalist rule in this country.

The Queen “Forgives” the Irish!

The Queen’s visit was the first time that an English monarch had set foot in southern Ireland since independence in 1921, indeed since George V’s visit in 1911. The bourgeois press in Britain and Ireland was awestruck as the Queen, accompanied by Irish president Mary McAleese, laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, dedicated to those who fought for Irish freedom against the British crown, from the 1798 United Irishmen to the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1919-21 war of Irish independence. Typical of the obsequious press coverage was the London Independent’s statement that “what made the appearance all the more memorable, was the Queen’s tilt of the head—apparently silencing centuries of conflict” (independent.co.uk, 22 May).

More grovelling followed when the Queen went to the national stadium in Croke Park, scene of the original Bloody Sunday when in November 1920 British auxiliary troops, the hated “Black and Tans,” opened fire on a crowd at a Gaelic football match, killing 14. This massacre was an act of revenge for the assassination by Irish nationalists of eleven undercover British agents earlier that day. In a speech in Dublin the Queen intoned: “With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently—or not at all.” Thus the British rulers would whitewash the history of their colonial rule in Ireland. This “reconciliation” is of a piece with Tory prime minister David Cameron’s grudging admission a year ago that the 1972 Bloody Sunday killing of 14 unarmed protesters in Derry was “unjustified,” while adding that of course Bloody Sunday is not the defining story of the British Army’s role in Northern Ireland from 1969-2007. At the time we wrote:

“This is a blatant attempt to bury the memory of British Army brutality in Northern Ireland once and for all. The theme about the need to ‘move on,’ to erase the memory of Bloody Sunday from history, is echoed ad nauseam in the British capitalist press. By portraying Bloody Sunday as an exceptional incident within an otherwise impeccable record, the Saville Report [on Bloody Sunday] is being used to refurbish the credentials of the imperialist forces who today shoot-to-kill with impunity in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

—Workers Hammer No. 211, Summer 2010

An official visit to Dublin by an English monarch would have been unthinkable if not for the imperialist “peace deal” codified in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, under which the Irish Republican Army (IRA) agreed to disarm itself and the Irish nationalists of Sinn Fein joined the Northern Ireland government in Stormont. Sinn Fein refused to condemn or protest the Queen’s visit, and were not part of the formal reception. The “peace process” gave cosmetic surgery to the Orange state [Northern Ireland] but it remains fundamentally the same repressive, anti-Catholic state that it was at the time of partition in 1921. Independence for Ireland replaced the yoke of British domination with a clericalist, Catholic state in the south. We fight against the national oppression of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland; at the same time we oppose the bourgeois nationalist programme for a “united Ireland,” which would create an oppressed Protestant minority. We insist that the conflicting claims of the interpenetrated Catholic and Protestant communities can only be equitably resolved in the framework of an Irish workers republic within a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles.

The Queen’s visit and the ballyhoo about the “normalisation” of relations between Britain and Ireland is not unconnected to the fact that today Britain has more trade with Ireland than it does with Brazil, Russia, India and China combined. Amid fears that the Irish government might default on its loans from the European Central Bank, the debt-ridden British government has a vested interest in ensuring that its loans are paid back. An article in the Irish satirical magazine the Phoenix (3 June) titled “British Queen frees the Irish from themselves” wryly noted: “The British lent us their Queen for a few days so as to revive our tourist industry and to bury the hatchet, sorry, the past.” It summed up: “Britain offered a loan (that protects British investors) and makes tut-tutting noises at nasty continentals.”

A comrade reporting from Dublin during the Queen’s visit said: “The visit has been accompanied by the largest security operation in the history of the state, with Dublin in almost complete lockdown for three days.” There were small protests by groups of Irish nationalists which were encircled by riot police who continually harassed and beat the demonstrators and arrested many. The Irish Anti-War Movement, dominated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), also called a “black balloon” protest under the slogan: “Remember the deaths at the hands of Her Majesty’s forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Conveniently not mentioned is the Irish bourgeoisie’s role in supporting the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan, including making Shannon airport available for U.S. military operations. Also whited out of history is British imperialism’s role in Northern Ireland.

“United Kingdom” and English Domination

The Sunday Times (29 May) reported that: “The Queen has signalled in a private meeting with David Cameron her concern at the prospect of the break-up of the United Kingdom.” This was in response to the victory of the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) in the Scottish elections in May. Similarly, at the time of her 1977 Silver Jubilee the Queen declared: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” We revolutionaries oppose the reactionary entity known as the “United Kingdom,” which incorporates the Orange statelet in Northern Ireland and rests on English domination over Scotland and Wales. The Westminster parliament reflects the favoured status granted to finance capital and the City of London by the ruling class, which has contempt for the former industrial areas of northern England, as well as Scotland and Wales.

A tirade of English chauvinism followed the victory of the SNP which now enjoys an outright majority in the Scottish parliament. The English press worked up a lather over the fact that the SNP might hold a referendum on independence— heaven forbid that the Scots should be allowed to decide such a question for themselves! The Spartacist League upholds the right of self-determination for the Scottish and Welsh nations—which means the right to separate (or not to separate). In reality, SNP leader Alex Salmond is in no rush to set a date for a referendum on independence because despite the popularity of certain SNP policies, such as lower student tuition fees than in England, the electorate might well vote no to independence. The SNP’s vision is one of an independent capitalist Scotland, under the English Crown and accepting the British armed forces. If an independent capitalist Scotland came into existence it would fare little better than Ireland, whose “Celtic Tiger” economy was once the SNP’s model.

Our attitude to the national question in Britain is grounded in intransigent opposition to all forms of nationalism—first and foremost the dominant English chauvinism. Our programme is for workers revolutions to overthrow all the capitalist regimes in Britain and in Ireland, North and South. The myriad forms of national oppression will be resolved when workers revolution has swept away capitalist rule on both sides of the Irish border and both sides of the Irish Sea.

Recall the Fate of Charles I!

In opposition to the royalist blather of the ruling class about “tradition” and “heritage,” we revolutionary Marxists have our own traditions. We recall the historic fate that befell Charles I in 1649 as a result of the defeat of the Royalist forces by Oliver Cromwell’s army. The English Revolution that began in 1640 took the form of a civil war between Royalists, who had the support of the landed aristocracy and the Anglican Church, and the Parliamentarians who included the rising capitalist class, backed by the labouring masses of the day. In 1645, Cromwell founded the New Model Army, heavily drawn from the ranks of yeomen, peasants and labouring classes of the cities, who became the decisive force in the revolution.

The New Model Army inflicted crushing defeats on the Royalists and in 1645 they captured the King. The conservative bourgeois elements in Parliament sought a compromise with the Royalists, enraging the army ranks who were led by the Levellers, the left wing of the revolution. In 1647 Parliament tried to disperse the army regiments, ordering them to enlist for Ireland or face immediate dismissal. The ranks mutinied, seized the King, held him captive and demanded that Cromwell should resume leadership of the army, which he did. But political debates raged between the Levellers and the generals and a split in the army was averted when the King escaped (or was freed) and the civil war re-ignited. Throughout 1648 Cromwell’s army again inflicted defeats on the Royalists. In Cromwell’s absence the army leadership in London, in alliance with the Levellers, decided to put the King on trial, which meant he would face execution. After some initial hesitation Cromwell endorsed the regicide, declaring: “I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown on it.” The execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649 marked the decisive defeat for the feudal order in England. The result was unprecedented progress, not least in the abolition of the monarchy under the appropriately irreverent and rational wording “the office of a king in this country is unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people.” The House of Lords was also abolished for a time, being deemed “useless and dangerous.” The English Republic adopted Common Law over the “Royal Prerogative,” abolished the “Star Chamber” system of courts and permitted a degree of religious dissent.

Two years after Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored in 1660. But there would be no going back to the situation where the feudal nobles ruled over the bourgeoisie. Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, pointed out that, in the course of defeating the Royalist side, Cromwell had created a new society and that this could not be undone by decrees of Parliament. He explained:

“In dispersing parliament after parliament Cromwell displayed as little reverence toward the fetish of ‘national’ representation as in the execution of Charles I he had displayed insufficient respect for a monarchy by the grace of God. Nonetheless it was this same Cromwell who paved the way for the parliamentarism and democracy of the two subsequent centuries. In revenge for Cromwell’s execution of Charles I, Charles II swung Cromwell’s corpse up on the gallows. But pre-Cromwellian society could not be re-established by any restoration. The works of Cromwell could not be liquidated by the thievish legislation of the Restoration because what has been written with the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen.”

—“Where Is Britain Going?” (1925)

Cromwell’s Conquest of Ireland

After the defeat of the Royalists in England, Cromwell organised an expedition to Ireland. In the outline of a report on the Irish question to the Communist Educational Association of German Workers in London, Karl Marx noted that “By engaging in the conquest of Ireland, Cromwell threw the English Republic out the window” (16 December 1867).

Cromwell’s conquest of the country was a continuation of the English Crown’s hundreds of years-long subjugation of Ireland. It represented, in the words of the Marxist authority on the English Civil War, Christopher Hill: “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy.” A necessary precondition for the English bourgeoisie’s invasion of Ireland was rooting out the Levellers from the ranks of the army. The prospect of being shipped to Ireland had provoked a Leveller revolt in the army in 1649. This time, unlike in 1647, Cromwell and his generals did not side with the mutineers. The Levellers were crushed by Cromwell at Burford, their leaders were arrested, four were executed. The episode showed that while the English Revolution, as a bourgeois revolution, was progressive in its ascendancy against feudalism, once the bourgeoisie took power, the progressive content soon gave way to reaction as the capitalist class consolidated its hold on power. Once established, bourgeois rule in its Irish colony was based on the profit-accumulating, imperialistic interests of that class.

In his writings on Britain, Trotsky emphasised the revolutionary traditions that the British working class needed to reclaim and emulate. This is in counterposition to the reformist Labour Party “lefts” who insisted that British workers could learn little from the experience of the Russian Revolution, as Britain was a more civilised, Christian country with established democratic channels through which socialism could patiently and peacefully be phased into existence. Trotsky advocated that British workers should learn from the Roundhead [Cromwellian] and Chartist traditions of revolutionary struggle, as against the Labour Party’s Fabian tradition of gradualism and pacifistic class-collaboration. Trotsky observed:

“The British bourgeoisie has erased the very memory of the seventeenth-century revolution by dissolving its past in ‘gradualness.’ The advanced British workers will have to re-discover the English revolution and find within its ecclesiastical shell the mighty struggle of social forces. Cromwell was in no case a ‘pioneer of labour.’ But in the seventeenth-century drama, the British proletariat can find great precedents for revolutionary action.”

—“Where Is Britain Going?” (1925)

Contrasting Cromwell with the Labour Party leaders who “dare not refuse pocket money to the Prince of Wales,” he declared “the dead lion of the seventeenth century is in this sense immeasurably greater than many living dogs.”

On the Chartist tradition Trotsky insisted: “As the Chartists tossed the sentimental preachers of ‘moral force’ aside and gathered the masses behind the banner of revolution, so the British proletariat is faced with ejecting reformists, democrats and pacifists from its midst and rallying to the banner of a revolutionary overturn.” Chartism was the first mass independent workers movement, brought into being by the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. The powerful left wing of the Chartists was republican, internationalist and revolutionary-minded. They asserted the right to bear arms and bitterly opposed the new, semi-military professional police in working-class districts across the country. Chartism was defeated and demoralised in the aftermath of the failure of the European-wide 1848 revolutions and the ensuing reaction. This paved the way for “Christian-socialist” Fabianism and the Labour Party, which since its founding in 1900 as the political expression of the trade union bureaucracy has worked to tie the working class to the bourgeois order.

Her Majesty’s Labour Party Vassals

Loyal to the capitalist state and its institutions, the Labour Party has always been a reliable prop for the monarchy, whether through staunch support or presenting the institution as a harmless irrelevance. At the Labour Party conference of 1923, when a resolution questioning the need for the monarchy was proposed, the “left” George Lansbury argued “what is the use of bothering about that just now” and the motion was voted down by 3,694,000 to 386,000!

The Labour leaders have a history of grovelling before the Crown—from Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, donning royal plumage when invited to Buckingham Palace in 1927 and graciously allowing King George V to arrange the 1931 popular-front government between Labour and the Tories, to Tony Blair’s craven service to the royal family following the death of Lady Diana and his insistence that the Queen is the “best of British.”

There was at least one amusing spectacle at the royal wedding—much to his chagrin, Blair’s fawning over the monarchy was not even rewarded with an invite. Whether the royal snub was a result of Blair’s conversion to Catholicism, the fox-hunting ban so loathed by the aristocracy or just his connection to the Labour Party (however tenuous its links to the working class) we can only speculate. Labour’s current leader, Ed Miliband, was keen to show he was fit for prime-ministerial office with his support for the royals and contempt for working people when, in the period before the royal wedding, he railed against the possibility of strikes being called anywhere near the occasion. Not that strikes were ever likely to disrupt such a patriotic affair given the present bunch of trade union misleaders.

Whatever occasional mutterings against the monarchy may come from Labour Party “lefts,” the reality on the ground is very different. That darling of the reformist left, Tony Benn, an avowed republican, has in fact sworn an oath in defence of the Crown, as a member of the Queen’s Privy Council, a position granted to everyone who becomes a governmental cabinet minister. It should be remembered that Benn was a member of the Labour cabinet that sent troops to Northern Ireland in 1969. Labour’s shameful tradition also includes Arthur Henderson who, as a cabinet member, was in the King’s “advisory” Privy Council when the British government ordered the execution of James Connolly for his heroic role as the head of the proletarian Irish Citizen Army in the Dublin 1916 Easter Rising against British rule.

British “Far Left”: Latter-Day Fabians

The British “far-left” organisations are steeped in Labourism and so they soft-pedal any opposition to the monarchy. In 1997, during the media-induced hysteria surrounding the death of Princes William and Harry’s mother Diana Spencer, the left whistled to the tune of Tony Blair’s “people’s princess” platitudes. Our article at the time reported:

“The fake-revolutionary left, ever in Labour’s tow, was swept along, nominal disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding. Diana Spencer may have been the girl from the 10,000 acres next door, but for the centrist Workers Power group, ‘Her depression, bulimia, suicide attempts and ultimately divorce provided a glitzy microcosm of the plight of millions of less wealthy women’ (Workers Power, September 1997). That (and more) said, Workers Power assured its readers that it would ‘not be joining in the wave of national mourning’ and even vowed to ‘do everything’ to get the monarchy ‘scrapped forever’—everything, that is, but oppose Blair’s Labour Party at election time.

“In the same vein, but even more nauseating, was the so-called Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)…. The CPGB’s Weekly Worker (4 September) carried a front-page eulogy by chief spokesman Jack Conrad. While allowing that ‘even a bourgeois republic is preferable to the anti-democratic monarchy,’ Conrad outdid even Blair himself in his treacly musings for the ‘troublesome princess’ who ‘represented a soul in a soulless world’: ‘Her brief 36 years epitomise the struggle and fate of the 20th century personality who by chance and/or design has been iconised and thus commodified and sold by the uncontrollable, all pervasive power of capital’.”

—Workers Hammer No. 159, November/December 1997

In contrast, our article maintained:

“From the standpoint of the working class, the death of the ‘Princess of Wales’ was not a tragedy; special interest in the affairs of royalty, which places the life of an aristocrat above that of her chauffeur, betrays something of a servile instinct. The archaic institution of monarchy should long ago have been consigned to the dustbin of history.”

For its part, the British SWP has gone a step further than the other reformists. At the founding of their ill-fated Respect Coalition in 2004, SWP leaders ensured that a resolution which called for the abolition of the monarchy was voted down!

For the reformist left, any opposition to the monarchy is framed by the consideration that it is an expensive excess and an embarrassment to the façade of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

Obviously, the vast cost of maintaining the royal parasites is an obscenity, but while this may be the main point of emphasis for liberals and reformists, Marxists realise capitalist budgets are made in the interests of the bourgeoisie and, for the bourgeoisie, royal visits, weddings and the monarchy itself are cheap indeed for the reactionary purposes they serve. The emphasis on tradition, heritage and historical continuity which this feudal relic implies is supposed to foster illusions in a class-harmonious, evolutionary society, free of tumultuous social change. Our comrades in the U.S. captured this perfectly in a 1977 article on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee:

“The Queen thus represents the British counterpart to the American myth that U.S. society is classless. In England it is manifestly impossible to deny the existence of class-based inequality. So the ruling class maintains that while there are classes, and there may be shifts in the class structure, there must be no class struggle. The monarchy is the living and familiar sign that there is a grossly unequal social place for everyone, and that this is historical and inevitable. That is why the Queen is treated with such dignity, why this cow is sacred.”

—Workers Vanguard No. 164, 1 July 1977

The monarchy does not merely fulfil a symbolic role, to the advantage of the British bourgeoisie, but stands ready as a rallying point for reaction. The Queen is the head of state; it is to her, and not parliament, that the armed forces and its officer corps swear an oath of allegiance. In the event of social crisis, in which the bourgeoisie felt its rule to be threatened, it is quite conceivable that the monarchy would be used in a reactionary mobilisation to stabilise the capitalist order, providing constitutional cover for a right-wing bonapartist coup. During WWII, discussions between the pro-Hitler Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII, and the Nazis in Germany placed the Duke as the rumoured likely prospect to head a quisling government in England after the fall of France in 1940.

In fact the royal prerogative of Queen Elizabeth II has already been used to bring down a government in Australia, where she is also head of state. As our Australian comrades explained:

“In 1975 Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, his government the object of a concerted CIA destabilisation campaign, threatened to expose the role of the top secret U.S. spy bases. The Queen’s man and more importantly the CIA’s man, Governor General John Kerr, dismissed the elected government. Utterly committed to the institutions of the capitalist state, including the constitutional powers invested in the Queen, the ALP [Australian Labor Party] tops preached loyalty to the parliamentary process rather than let an enraged working class get ‘out of hand.’ The events of 1975 illustrated how the constitutional monarchy in Britain and here could be used in some future crisis to bestow ‘legitimacy’ on the establishment of a reactionary, possibly military regime to defend the capitalist order.”

—Australasian Spartacist No. 144, Autumn 1992

Workers Revolution Will Sweep Away Medieval Rubbish

Karl Marx reported with great affection a protest by the British working class against class oppression in 1855. This was a protest against the Sunday Trading Bill and Beer Bill which ensured shops were closed and restricted the opening hours of “places of public entertainment” (most notably public houses): their “betters” had decided the workers should be on their knees in church instead. Seeing the stark hypocrisy of the upper classes, who were not affected and who spent the day on leisurely carriage rides in London’s Hyde Park, a mass demonstration of the workers was called there and concluded in the following confrontation with English high society:

“A babel of jeering, taunting, discordant ejaculations, in which no language is as rich as English, enveloped [the upper classes] from both sides. As it was an improvised concert, instruments were lacking. The chorus therefore had to use its own organs and was compelled to confine itself to vocal music. And what a diabolical concert it was: a cacophony of grunting, hissing, whistling, squeaking, snarling, growling, croaking, shrieking, groaning, rattling, howling, gnashing sounds! A music that could drive men mad and move a stone. To this must be added outbursts of genuine old-English humour peculiarly mixed with long-contained seething wrath. ‘Go to church!’ were the only articulate sounds that could be distinguished. One lady soothingly offered a prayer book in conventional binding from her carriage. ‘Give it to read to your horses!’ came the thunderous reply, shouted by a thousand voices.”

—Karl Marx, “Anti-Church Movement—Demonstration in Hyde Park” (28 June 1855)

So moved by this demonstration of proletarian class outrage, Marx wrote: “We saw it from beginning to end and do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the English Revolution began in Hyde Park yesterday.”

We look to the revolutionary proletariat of these islands to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords—this time for good—and the established churches, along with the bourgeois rulers and all other forms of social parasitism, through socialist revolution! To do so the working class will need its revolutionary organisation. Our aim is to build this, modelled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party which, acting as a tribune for all the oppressed, led the storming of the tsar’s “prison house of peoples” and liberated one sixth of the earth from autocratic, chauvinist oppression and capitalist exploitation. The tsar was prevented from gaining asylum in Britain with his cousin King George V, who feared the repercussions this deeply unpopular move would have had for his own dynasty. Lenin and Trotsky’s desire was to put the tsar on trial as with the fate of Charles I in the English Revolution and Louis XVI in the French Revolution. But with the counterrevolutionary White armies closing in on where the tsar and his family were imprisoned, the local Bolsheviks were forced to wipe the Romanov dynasty from the face of the Earth. As Isaac Deutscher relayed from Trotsky’s diary:

“In the midst of civil war, [Trotsky] says, the Bolsheviks could not leave the White Armies with a ‘live banner to rally around’; and after the Tsar’s death any one of his children might have served them as the rallying symbol. The Tsar’s children ‘fell victim to that principle which constitutes the axis of Monarchy: dynastic succession’.”

—The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929-1940 (1963)

Forward to a world where the perversions of monarchy and dynastic succession are remembered only as abolished relics of the past!

On The 95th Anniversary- From The In Defense Of Maxism Website-James Connolly and the Easter Rising

James Connolly and the Easter Rising

Written by Alan Woods and Ted Grant
Saturday, 14 April 2001

This Easter marks the 85th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin (Ireland) against British imperialist rule. The outstanding leader of that movement was James Connolly. There have been many attempts to portray him simply as an Irish nationalist. But Connolly was, first and foremost, a militant workers' leader and a Marxist. He alone in the annals of the British and Irish Labour Movement succeeded in developing the ideas of Marxism.

Born in 1868 into a poor family in Edinburgh, James Connolly was a genuine proletarian. His working life commenced at the age of ten. All his life he lived and breathed the world of the working class, shared in its trials and tribulations, suffered from its defeats and exulted in its victories. Connolly was a self-educated man who became a brilliant speaker and writer. He alone in the annals of the British and Irish Labour Movement succeeded in developing the ideas of Marxism.

On the basis of a careful study of the writings of Marx and Engels, he developed an independent standpoint and made an original contribution. Even more remarkably, he did this without the benefit of direct contact with the other outstanding Marxist thinkers of the time: Lenin, Trotsky or Luxemburg.

From the first, Connolly had to contend with the same problems that blighted the existence of the rest of his class: dire and unrelieved poverty, which at times made it all but impossible for him to feed his family. But nothing could deter him from his chosen path. With unceasing vigour and absolute single-mindedness, Connolly fought for socialism. The programme of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, written by Connolly, was not a nationalist but a socialist programme based upon:

"Establishment of AN IRISH SOCIALIST REPUBLIC based on the public ownership by the Irish people of the land, and instruments of production, distribution and exchange. Agriculture to be administered as a public function, under boards of management elected by the agricultural population and responsible to them and to the nation at large. All other forms of labour necessary to the well-being of the community to be conducted on the same principles."

Connolly was, first and foremost, a militant workers' leader. The Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU), under the leadership of Larkin and Connolly, led the stormy wave of class struggle that shook Ireland to its foundations in the years before 1914. Rarely have these Islands seen such a level of bitter class conflict. This affected not only Dublin but also Belfast, where Connolly succeeded in uniting Catholic and Protestant workers in struggle against the employers. In October 1911 he led the famous Belfast Textile workers strike and organised the workers of that sector - predominately low-paid and very exploited women.

The wave of strikes was countered by the employers in the notorious Dublin lockout of 1913. Here we saw the real face of the Irish bourgeoisie: grasping, repressive, reactionary. The Dublin bosses, organised by William Martin Murphy, the chairman of the Employers' Federation and owner of the Irish Independent newspaper, set out to crush the workers and their organisations. The ITGWU replied by blacking Murphy's newspapers, and he retaliated by locking out all ITGWU members.

The issue of class unity runs like a red thread through all the writings and speeches of Connolly: "Perhaps they will see that the landlord who grinds his peasants on a Connemara estate, and the landlord who rack-rents them in a Cowgate slum, are brethren in fact and deed. Perhaps they will realise that the Irish worker who starves in an Irish cabin and the Scots worker who is poisoned in an Edinburgh garret are brothers with one hope and destiny." (C.D. Greaves, James Connolly, p. 61.)

Throughout the lockout, Larkin and Connolly repeatedly appealed to the class solidarity of the British workers. They addressed mass rallies in England, Scotland and Wales, which were also the scene of big class battles in the years before the war. The appeal of the Irish workers did not fall on deaf ears. Their cause was enthusiastically supported by the rank and file of the British movement, although the right wing Labour leaders were preparing to ditch the Irish workers as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Despite the solidarity and sympathy of the workers of Britain, the trade union leaders refused to organise solidarity strikes, the only way that victory could have been achieved. In the end, the workers were starved back to work. Bitterly, Connolly noted:

"And so we Irish workers must again go down to Hell, bow our backs to the last of the slave drivers, let our hearts be seared by the iron of his hatred and instead of the sacramental wafer of brotherhood and common sacrifice, eat the dust of defeat and betrayal. Dublin is isolated." (p. 23)

The Citizen's Army

In the years preceding World War One, the British ruling class was facing revolutionary developments in Ireland and in Britain. In order to head off the danger of revolution, they resorted to the "Orange card". Lord Carson organised and armed the hooligans of the Belfast slums in the Ulster Volunteers, pledged to resist Irish Home Rule by force. When the Liberal government in London contemplated using the British army in Ireland, they were met with the "mutiny at the Curragh". Connolly remained firm in the face of the sectarian madness. He organised a Labour demonstration under the auspices of the ITGWU, "the only union that allows no bigotry in its ranks." In answer to the sectarians and religious bigots, he declared class war, issuing his famous manifesto: "To the Linen Slaves of Belfast".

In order to protect themselves against the brutal attacks of police and hired thugs of the employers, the workers set up their own defence force: the Irish Citizens' Army (ICA). This was the first time in these Islands that workers had organised themselves on an armed basis to defend themselves against the common enemy: the bosses and the scabs. The latter, it should be remembered, were much more numerous than at the present time, as a result of the widespread conditions of poverty and despair. The two main leaders were Connolly (himself an ex-soldier) and Captain Jack J. White DSO - a Protestant Ulsterman. But Connolly saw the ICA not only as a defence force, but as a revolutionary army, dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism. He wrote:

"An armed organisation of the Irish working class is a phenomenon in Ireland. Hitherto, the workers of Ireland have fought as parts of the armies led by their masters, never as a member of any army officered, trained, and inspired by men of their own class. Now, with arms in their hands, they propose to steer their own course, to carve their own future." (Workers Republic, 30 October 1915)

As we see from these lines, Connolly envisaged the ICA in class terms, as an organisation organically linked to the mass organisations of the proletariat. It was funded out of the subscriptions of the members of the union, and its activities were organised from Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the ITGWU in Dublin. The Citizens Army drilled and paraded openly on the streets of Dublin for several years before 1916. Here was no secret organisation engaged in the methods of individual terrorism, but a genuine workers' militia: the first workers' Red Army in Europe.

Unfortunately, the movement in the direction of revolution in Ireland was rudely cut across by the outbreak of the First World War. In August 1914, despite all the resolutions passed by the congresses of the Socialist International, every one of the leaderships of the Social Democratic Parties betrayed the cause of socialist internationalism and voted for the War. The only honourable exceptions were the Russians, the Serbs - and the Irish. Right from the start, Connolly adopted an unswerving internationalist stance, which was, in all fundamentals, identical with the position adopted by Lenin.

Commenting on the betrayal of the leaders of the Socialist International, he wrote in Forward (15 August, 1914):

"What then becomes of all our resolutions; all our protests of fraternisation; all our threats of general strikes; all our carefully built machinery of internationalism; all our hopes for the future?"

And he reached the same conclusion as Lenin. In answer to the kind of pacifism that was the hallmark of Labour Lefts such as Ramsay MacDonald (at that time) and the leaders of the ILP, he wrote:

"A great continental uprising of the working class would stop the war; a universal protest at public meetings would not save a single life from being wantonly slaughtered."

Connolly was not just a socialist, not just a revolutionary: he was an internationalist to the marrow of his bones.

The Easter Rising

From the start of the War, Connolly was virtually isolated. Internationally, he had no contact. Outside of Ireland, the Labour Movement seemed to be as silent as the grave. True, there were symptoms of a revival in Britain, with the Glasgow rent strike of 1915. But Connolly feared that the workers of Britain would move too late. The idea of an uprising had clearly been taking shape in Connolly's mind. The threat that Britain would introduce conscription into Ireland was the main issue that concentrated the mind, not only of Connolly, but also of the petit bourgeois nationalists of the Irish Volunteers. Connolly therefore pressed them to enter a militant alliance with Labour for an armed uprising against British imperialism. In the event, the leaders of the Volunteers withdrew at the last movement, leaving the Rising in the lurch.

Was Connolly right to move when he did? The question is a difficult one. The conditions were frankly unfavourable. Although there were strikes in Ireland right up to the outbreak of the Rising, the Irish working class had been exhausted and weakened by the exertions of the lockout. There were rumours that the British authorities were planning to arrest the leading Irish revolutionaries. Connolly finally decided to throw everything into the balance. He drew the conclusion that it was better to strike first. He aimed to strike a blow that would break the ice and show the way, even at the cost of his own life. To fight and lose was preferable than to accept and capitulate. When Connolly marched out of Liberty Hall for the last time that fateful morning, he whispered to a comrade: "We are going out to be slaughtered." When the latter asked him: "Is there no chance of success?" he replied: "None whatever."

Connolly was undoubtedly a giant. His actions were those of a genuine revolutionary, unlike the craven conduct of the Labour leaders who backed the imperialist slaughter - with the enthusiastic support of the Irish bourgeois nationalists. Yet he also made some mistakes. There is no point in denying it, although some people wish to make Connolly into a saint - while simultaneously ditching or distorting his ideas. There were serious weaknesses in the Rising itself. No attempt was made to call a general strike. On Monday 24, 1916, the Dublin trams were still running, and most people went about their business. No appeal was made to the British soldiers.

Only 1,500 members of the Dublin Volunteers and ICA answered the call to rise. The nationalists had already split between the Redmondites - the Parliamentary Irish Group - who backed the War, and the left wing. However, on the eve of the Rising, the leader of the Volunteers, Eoin MacNeil publicly instructed all members to refuse to come out. As so many times before and since, the nationalist bourgeoisie betrayed the cause of Ireland.

The behaviour of the nationalist leaders came as no surprise to Connolly, who always approached the national liberation struggle from a class point of view. He never had any trust in the bourgeois and petit bourgeois Republicans, and tirelessly worked to build an independent movement of the working class as the only guarantee for the re conquest of Ireland. Since his death there have been many attempts to erase his real identity as a revolutionary socialist and present him as just one more nationalist. This is utterly false. One week before the Rising he warned the Citizens Army: "The odds against us are a thousand to one. But if we should win, hold onto your rifles because the Volunteers may have a different goal. Remember, we are not only for political liberty, but for economic liberty as well."

From a military point of view the Rising was doomed in advance - although if the Volunteers had not stabbed it in the back, the Uprising could have had far greater success. As it was, the British used artillery to batter the GPO (the rebel centre) into submission. By Thursday night, after four days of heroic resistance against the most frightful odds, the rebels were compelled to sign an unconditional surrender.

Although the Rising itself ended in failure, it left behind a tradition of struggle that had far-reaching consequences. It was this that probably Connolly had in mind. In particular the savagery of the British army, which shot all the leaders of the Rising in cold blood after a farcical drumhead trial, caused a wave of revulsion throughout all Ireland. James Connolly, who was badly wounded and unable to stand, was shot strapped to a chair. But the British had miscalculated. The gunshots that ended the life of this great martyr of the working class aroused a new generation of fighters eager to revenge Ireland's wrongs.

The Easter Rising was like a tocsin bell, the echoes of which rang throughout Europe. After two years of imperialist slaughter, at last the ice was broken! A courageous word had been spoken, and could be heard above the din of the bombs and cannon-fire. Lenin received the news of the uprising enthusiastically. This was understandable, given his position. The War posed tremendous difficulties for the Marxist internationalists. Lenin was isolated with a small group of supporters. On all sides there was capitulation and betrayal. The class struggle was temporarily in abeyance. The Labour leaders were participating in coalition governments with the social-patriots. The events in Dublin completely cut across this. That is why Lenin was so enthusiastic about the uprising. But he also pointed out:

"The misfortune of the Irish is that they have risen prematurely when the European revolt of the proletariat has not yet matured. Capitalism is not so harmoniously built that the various springs of rebellion can of themselves merge at one effort without reverses and defeats."

Had the Rising occurred a couple of years later, it would not have been isolated. It would have had powerful reserves in the shape of the mass revolutionary movement that swept through Europe after the October Revolution in 1917. But Connolly was not to know this.

Importance of leadership

Some sorry ex-Marxists criticised the Easter Rising from a right wing standpoint, such as Plekhanov. In an article in Nashe Slovo dated 4 July 1916, Trotsky denounced Plekhanov's remarks about the Rising as "wretched and shameful" and added: "the experience of the Irish national uprising is over....the historical role of the Irish proletariat is just beginning."

Unfortunately, this prediction was falsified by history. The tragedy of the Irish working class was that, unlike Lenin, Connolly did not create a revolutionary Marxist party, armed with theory, that would have carried on his work after his death. This was his biggest mistake, and one which had the most tragic consequences. In the same way that the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht later beheaded the German revolution, so the killing of Connolly removed any chance of the Irish working class leading the revolutionary movement against British imperialism. This was a heavy price to pay!

Connolly had created the Irish Labour Party, with a solid base in the trade unions and the working class. In effect, it was the workers of the Irish Citizens Army who had led the Easter Rising, not the petit bourgeois Volunteers. In fact, Sinn Fein played NO role in the uprising, while the Irish bourgeois nationalists openly betrayed it.

Yet, when Connolly was removed from the picture, it was the bourgeois and petit bourgeois nationalists who took advantage of the situation to seize control of the movement. Tragically, the leaders of the Irish Labour Party, lacking Connolly's grounding in Marxism, proved to be hopelessly inadequate to the tasks posed by history. Instead of maintaining Connolly's fight for an independent class policy, they tail ended the nationalists, standing down in their favour in the general election after the War.

Under the leadership of the bourgeois and petit bourgeois nationalists, the movement was side-tracked into a guerrilla struggle, and then betrayed. Fearful of the prospect of revolution, the rotten Irish bourgeoisie reached an agreement with London to divide the living body of Ireland. All Connolly's warnings about the treacherous role of the bourgeoisie were confirmed by the terrible events surrounding partition. The legacy of this betrayal is still with us today.

For the last 85 years, the Irish bourgeois and petit bourgeois nationalists have demonstrated their complete incapacity for solving the tasks of the Irish national liberation struggle. In 1922, the bourgeois leaders signed the partition of Ireland. This problem cannot be solved on a capitalist basis. For the last 30 years the Provisional IRA have been trying to solve the problem by a senseless campaign of bombing and shooting. These tactics of individual terrorism have absolutely nothing in common with the methods of Connolly and the Citizens Army, which were always based on class politics and organically linked to the proletariat and the mass workers organisations.

What have these methods achieved after 30 years? Over three thousand deaths; the destruction of a whole generation of Irish youth; the splitting of the population of the North into two hostile camps; a terrible legacy of sectarian bitterness. And with what result? Has the border question been solved? Let us speak clearly: After three decades of so-called armed struggle, the cause of Irish reunification is further away today than at any other time. Ignominiously, the leaders of the Provisionals have capitulated for the sake of a few paltry ministerial portfolios. Nothing has been solved for either Catholics or Protestants.

This is the terrible legacy of decades of individual terrorism and the total lack of any class or socialist perspective. True, there was a serious division in the past between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. But now in place of division we have a yawning abyss. Yet none of this would have been necessary if Connolly's ideas and methods had prevailed.

In his lifetime, Connolly always fought for the unity of the working class above all national and religious lines. By concentrating on class issues, he succeeded in uniting the Catholic and Protestant workers in the struggle against their common enemy - the employing class. That is the only way to get out of the present mess. The only way to solve what remains of Ireland's national problem is as a by-product of the revolutionary struggle for socialism. That was true in Connolly's day. And it remains true today. There can be no reunification of Ireland while the working class remains divided along sectarian lines.

The socialist revolution in the North is inextricably linked to the perspective of socialist revolution in the South - and in Britain. In other words, it can only be solved with a proletarian and internationalist policy. There is still a ray of hope in the North of Ireland. Despite everything, the fundamental organisations of the working class - the trade unions - remain united. They are probably the only real non-sectarian mass organisations that still exist. This is the base upon which we can build! That would undoubtedly be the message of James Connolly, were he alive at this time.

Eighty five years later, it is necessary to cut through all the fog of historical fantasy and nationalist mystification that surrounds the events of Easter Week, and see the key role of the proletariat. What a great opportunity was missed with the death of James Connolly! But the new generation must take the lesson to heart. Connolly failed because he did not create - as Lenin created - the necessary instrument with which to change society: a revolutionary party and a revolutionary leadership!

Today we pledge ourselves to defend the heritage of this great Marxist, fighter, and martyr of the working class. We must rescue the ideas of Connolly which have been stolen and distorted beyond recognition by people who have nothing to do with Connolly, socialism or the working class. We must continue the fight for Connolly's ideas - the only ideas that can guarantee the ultimate victory. We must create the necessary revolutionary organisation, soundly based on the programme, policy and methods of Marxism. And we must understand that such an organisation must be firmly based in the only soil in which it can grow and flourish: the trade unions and the mass organisations of Labour in Ireland, North and South, as well as on the other side of the Irish Sea.

The Easter Rising was a glorious harbinger of what is still to come. The job was left unfinished in 1916. The task now falls upon our shoulders. Armed with the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky - and Connolly - we shall not fail!