The Queen is Dead: Long Live The Working Class!

The nine-mile line to mourn Queen Elizabeth II, the monstrous figurehead for degenerate Nazi-loving billionaires and callous capitalist bosses, reminds us that the working class still struggles through a dark night of false unity with the ruling class. Through Elizabeth’s seventy years as the royal family’s number-one parasite, British imperialism exploited, enslaved, tortured, and slaughtered countless workers across the globe (see box on the British atrocities on page 6). The Queen “spent a lifetime smiling and waving at cheering native people around the world, a sort of living ghost of a system of rapacious and bloodthirsty extraction” (New York Times, 9/11). As the monarchy looted an estimated $28 billion from the international working class, more than 20 percent of the British population sank into poverty (House of Commons Library, April 2022).

But even though many in our class seem enthralled by the royal family’s wretched excess and lavish pageantry, including the $9 million it took to put Elizabeth in a box, a reckoning is coming. As of September 1, a week before the Queen’s death, more than 150,000 workers—including postal and telecom workers, trash collectors, and lawyers—were on strike to protest stagnant salaries shredded by double-digit inflation. Despite no support from the so-called Labour Party, 45,000 transportation workers walked off their jobs, paralyzing train, subway, and bus lines across the country for days. Teachers, nurses, and doctors will soon have strike votes of their own, and the country’s two largest trade unions are pushing for coordinated strikes in “one of the most significant waves of industrial unrest the United Kingdom has seen since the ‘winter of discontent’ in the late 1970s” (cnn.com, 9/1). Workers will always fight back!

As escalating inter-imperialist rivalry leads to world war, the murderous essence of the British monarchy and all the global ruling classes will be exposed. When that day comes, what Progressive Labor Party does to organize workers now will make all the difference. It will determine whether the millions shedding tears for the dead Queen will continue on into the furnaces of fascism and imperialist war or whether they’ll join PLP and our Red Army in the fight for a classless society—for communism.

Inequality: as capitalist as queen and country
Following World War II, Britain, like much of Europe, installed a social safety net to counter workers’ gains under socialism in the Soviet Union. But with each passing decade, as the British Empire waned and expired, the rulers no longer had imperialist super-profits to prop up their failing profit system at home. Wages, services, and living standards were cut to the bone.

In recent years, untold thousands in Britain have died from neglect by a financially gutted National Health Service (independent.co.uk, 1/28/17).

Nearly one in five children live in households where people go hungry regularly(borgenproject.org). Super-exploited immigrants have suffered the most from these racist attacks. Amid this misery, the Queen sat placidly on her throne with her heap of stolen jewels, gently spewing the big lie that the British Crown actually cared about its loyal subjects. In real life, Elizabeth cared only about her horses, her plump rat dogs, her Nazi sympathizer husband, her appalling children (including rapist Prince Andrew and famously racist and corrupt Prince Charles, finally promoted to King), and the finance capitalists who run the country as a very junior partner to U.S. imperialism.

Gross inequalities are part and parcel of capitalism, a system where humanity takes a back seat to the drive for maximum profit. In 2020, a girl born in “the most deprived areas” of England could expect to have only 52 healthy years—as compared to 71 years in “the least deprived areas” (theguardian.com, 4/25). That Queen Elizabeth stayed hale and hearty into her mid-90s is no cause for celebration. It’s the story of a vampire whose wealth and privileges were sucked from the blood and toil of the working class.

The only good royal is a dead royal
Not everyone was fooled by “likely the most famous person on the planet” (Vanity Fair, 9/8). In the days after Charles grabbed the crown and scepter, some workers faced arrest for holding signs declaring “Not My King,” reminiscent of the “Not My President” protests by anti-Trump workers in the U.S. The problem with reformist opposition is that it accepts the dead-end political superstructures of capitalism, whether electoral “democracy” or a “constitutional” monarchy. In either case, it keeps workers tied to lesser-evil bosses and straitjacketed by the profit system.

Many Black workers and immigrants from one-time British colonies used social media to critique the bloody, racist history of British colonialism. While this was better than mourning a dead figurehead, national liberation politics doesn’t aim to smash class society; it wants workers to be ruled by bosses who look like them. This class-collaborationist thinking feeds the deadly trap of nationalism. It ultimately serves the dominant liberal rulers in enlisting working-class support for World War III.

Workers’ fightback is the future
Whether the bosses use monarchs or presidents or generals to control and pacify the working class, we have no decent future under capitalism. Whatever reform crumbs they give us will be clawed back in the inevitable next crisis of a chaotic system. In the muck and mire of this political cesspool, it is the Party’s job to challenge dead-end ideas that can lead only to fascism and global war.

The workers in the Soviet Union and China got a small taste of what is possible in a society built by and for workers. Basic needs for all—food, housing, health care, literacy—were foremost. Racism and sexism were attacked as rotten ideas that divide the working class. While these socialist societies wound up reverting to capitalism, they pointed the way to what a communist world could be. For our Party, the first step is to continue to immerse ourselves in working class struggles, where we can smash the all-class unity the bosses are so desperate to build. PLP has a different vision. We see a future where workers will turn the guns around and end capitalism for all time with communist revolution. Join us!J

In 1933, the British royal family showed its true colors with a Nazi salute. From left: Queen Elizabeth’s mother, the wife of soon-to-be-King George VI; eight-year-old Princess Elizabeth, the  future Queen; Princess Margaret, her younger sister; and Prince Edward of York, better known as the Duke of Windsor, who had a mutual admiration society with Adolph Hitler. The Sun, July 18, 2015