For a workers republic!

Hello comrades. Thank you everyone who has showed up today, and thank you to the RCO in particular for calling this demo. We welcome this opportunity to protest not just the King’s visit but against the existence of this feudal relic altogether. King Charles’ trip to Australia is not some benign holiday of his to be ignored. It is an affirmation of his authority as King and head of state of this country—a direct affront to all working people and to the most elementary of democratic sentiment. As such, it is crucially important to protest his visit, to fight like hell to drive this old man with his new hat out of this country—to recall the fate of Charles the First and smash the monarchy altogether. We in the Spartacist League say: Abolish the monarchy! Forward to a workers republic!

King Charles sits atop a throne of blood, the ugly face of a monarchy that has presided over centuries of crimes against the working class and oppressed the world over. It was the monarchy’s governments that massacred the Mau Mau in Kenya; that committed atrocities in Malaya; that turned the carving and butchering of Palestine from Zionist fantasy to genocidal reality. The British Empire’s colonies and its post-federation successor waged brutal genocidal wars against the Aboriginal people, stealing their land and strangling their language and culture—something that is continuing today. And against the working people of this country, it was the monarchy’s troops which were sent in to suppress any who dared to rebel from Castle Hill to Eureka, many of them led by the very Chartists and Irish rebels that were forcibly shipped to this land. Today, his majesty’s governments in Britain and Australia are desperately holding on to the declining US-led world order, supporting the ongoing genocide in Gaza and forging the AUKUS military pact—part of an anti-China war drive which promises nothing less than death and destruction for the Chinese people, the working class of Australia and beyond.

The monarchy is far from an irrelevant and harmless artefact of bygone days. In fact, it is integral to the maintenance of Australian capitalism. The King’s Governor-General has the power to impose martial law and dismiss governments. The ruling class has again and again relied on the monarchy as a bastion of reaction to defend their rule—in times of crisis serving as the focus of the real forces directed against the working class. In fact, the monarch represents the most perfect living manifestation of the Australian ruling class’s strategy—previously, as the stalwart barking dog of the British Empire, and since then, alongside the mother country, as a junior partner to the American Empire.

What happened to Whitlam is instructive. His government’s failure to placate a restive working class and solve the crisis of Australian capitalism, alongside his questioning of the US spy base in Pine Gap, attracted the ire of not just the US, but the British and Australian ruling classes who had by then hitched their wagon to American imperialism’s fortunes. As a result, the American CIA and the British MI5 connived with the monarchy to throw Whitlam out. This was met with rapture from the Australian capitalists. At a most critical moment, the ruling class relied on the British monarchy and their American big brother to defend the interests of Australian capitalism.

Now as times are looking increasingly uncertain, the ruling class is clinging on ever tighter to the monarchy. Today, self-declared republican Albanese looks to the King as both a distraction to help shore up Australia’s “social cohesion” as well as a safeguard for when that social cohesion falls apart. Meanwhile, the powers that be continue to paint the monarchy with a benign veneer in the classic Australian fashion. That is, portraying the monarchy’s existence as representing little more than coin mintage, street names and the occasional royal tour.

In such a climate, what is necessary is to refuse to swallow the ruling class’s lies and not take this affront lying down. The workers movement should not have so much as let the King land in this country and as he managed to land, to drive him out of town through strikes and protests. If successful, this could have seriously weakened the already weak Labor government and opened the door for the working class to fight back.

Instead, in spite of all the talk of burying Labor, the union bureaucracy has not said a word, twiddling their thumbs and pretending not to notice the King’s arrival. As for much of the left, intoxicated by a mixture of sectarianism and state-induced apathy, they have refused to even consider combining our modest forces and fighting to protest both Charles’ arrival and the monarchy itself. To this we say: If you aren’t going to stand up to the monarchy when it counts, if your opposition to the monarchy is at best slick words on a paper, how the hell are you actually going to take on the ruling class and their interests?

And when you boil it down, that is the question that the fight for a republic comes down to: what is the leadership of the republican and workers movement, and do they have the capacity to overthrow Australian capitalism? The ruling class is not going to do away with one of their best last lines of defence, especially not in times that increasingly look like that they might just need it. If the movement is led by those who aren’t even going to try to take on the ruling class you haven’t got a chance!

Nowhere is this clearer than in the lukewarm liberal official representatives of Republicanism. Charles’ arrival was inaugurated by an encounter with republicans—not in the form of protest but rather a prostrating prime minister and premier before their King. As for the so-called “Australian Republic Movement,” they don’t dare to protest against the King during his visit, meekly holding zoom meetings and making a toast celebrating his departure. That is, when the coast is clear from any potential friction with a ruling class currently bathing in his majesty’s royal prerogatives.

As for the workers movement, it is everywhere led by leaders who bow down to Albanese, who in turn bows down before the crown. In spite of all the talks of burying Labor, they are still attached at the hip to the Labor Party and the ruling class they administer for. The strategy of even the most left-posing bureaucrats in unions such as the MUA, ETU and the CFMEU has been to support and influence Labor to “make capitalism work” for their memberships. In the wake of Albanese’s union busting, they have at best done one-day demos while declaring their intent to “bury Labor” in the next election in the hopes that the ALP “learns their lesson.” On the arrival of the King they have kept to this pattern, silently hiding in a corner, refusing to even attempt to smash Albanese’s precious social cohesion.

This is not unique to Australia. Upon the Queen’s death, the trade-union bureaucrats of the British TUC, including the “left” “heroes” of the so-called summer of discontent, criminally cancelled strikes during an ongoing strike wave, instead proclaiming their deepest sorrow at such a “loss.” Against such boot-licking prostrating, our comrades in Britain organised the only demonstration against the monarchy in London on the day of the Queen’s funeral. As for almost all the British left, tailing the bureaucracy that was actively leading the strike wave to defeat, they boycotted the demonstration.

Unfortunately, this has been repeated here in Australia with many on the left deciding to remain in the peanut gallery, refusing to build or even show up to this protest. As for the RCO, to their credit, they have initiated this demonstration. What’s more, they can correctly argue the necessity of revolutionary republicanism and the need for revolution more broadly.

But the central roadblock to fight for a republic is the current leadership of the workers movement, which ties the working class to Labor and the ruling class. The fight for not just a republic but for revolution itself is inseparable from the fight to remove this roadblock, to drive a wedge between the working-class base and the bourgeois top of the workers movement. Not through abstract declarations of the need for revolution but by putting a concrete path forwards in the struggles today, against the doomed strategy of today’s misleadership. This is exactly what we Spartacists have been fighting for from the fight against AUKUS to opposition to the Zionist terror in Palestine to the struggle in defence of the CFMEU.

But for the RCO, they assign this task to some imagined future where the Communist Party is magically reforged. In the meantime the RCO abstractly preaches to workers of the need for Communism. In fact, when push comes to shove the RCO bows before Labor. In the upcoming Queensland election they actively call to vote for Labor and the Greens excusing such a call with the lame reason that Queensland Labor has offered some cynical bribes while they continue to wage war on workers and the oppressed. The federal and Queensland Labor parties have drawn a line against the working class—batting for the bosses with AUKUS, Israel and now through union busting. Instead of fighting for a working-class alternative in the elections, sowing the seeds from which a revolutionary party can sprout, the RCO instead throw their lot behind Labor and the Greens in a bid to defeat the LNP and “keep the right out of power.” That is, building the very forces whose government has openly betrayed the working class and are thus paving the way for Dutton and his coalition. It is a very good thing that the RCO has fought for this demonstration today against the monarchy, but abolishing the monarchy will never be accomplished attached to Albanese nor his posse nationally and in Queensland.

To summarise: A leadership too spineless to take on the monarchy will never be able to confront, let alone overthrow the ruling class. And the only way you’re going to get such a leadership is not by tailing their failing strategy, neither is it by abstractly preaching for Communism from the sidelines. To fight for a republic and revolutionary workers movement alike, what is needed is a ruthless struggle to break the working class from today’s traitorous leadership. This requires nothing less than combating head-on the social-chauvinists, the King-kissers and all who conciliate with them. With that, we in the Spartacists say once more: Abolish the Monarchy! Forward to a workers republic!