Queen Elizabeth II, chief of the British parasites, representative of a class of parasites, died on Thursday, September 8, 2022. Her funeral on Monday, September 19, was the most expensive state funeral in the United Kingdom’s history, costing taxpayers over £7.5 million. It was attended by thousands of foreign leaders and dignitaries, and it is likely that hundreds of millions of people across the world watched the live broadcast.
To most of the British public and throughout much of the Western and Anglophone world, Elizabeth II is seen as a positive symbol of a post-imperial Britain. Her reign of over 70 years — the second-longest reign of any monarch in recorded history — was marked by the decolonization and independence of many of Britain’s colonies and protectorates, the official “abolition” of the British Empire, and the empire’s formal transition into the British Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth was established in 1926, and took its current shape in 1949. Gradually, especially from the 1950s onward, anti-colonial independence movements gained momentum across the Third World, and the British Empire began to fracture; as the empire lost or relinquished sovereignty over its former dominions, most of the newly forming states were integrated into the Commonwealth. Today, of the Commonwealth’s 56 member-states, all of which are former British dominions, 15 are constitutional monarchies that recognize the British monarch as their head of state, while the remainder, in accordance with the London Declaration of 1949, recognize the British monarch “as the symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth.”
The Commonwealth Charter officially describes the British Commonwealth of Nations as “a voluntary association of independent and equal sovereign states.”
The truth, however, is that Britain never truly relinquished its colonies. Today, as the sun sets on Elizabeth Windsor’s reign over the United Kingdom, it retains a vast capitalist empire. Elizabeth II did not oversee the decolonization and abolition of the British Empire. Rather, she assisted in its modernization, its transformation into a network of capitalist neo-colonies, in the form of the Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth of Nations is an instrument of Britain’s capitalist empire. It maintains the greater share of Britain’s “former” colonies in the chains of manufactured underdevelopment and mass poverty. The transition from “empire” to “commonwealth” was nothing but the transition from the “old” colonialism, characterized by direct control of colonies through military occupation, to the “new” colonialism, characterized by indirect control of “former” colonies through enforced underdevelopment and economic dependency. Most Commonwealth member-states are underdeveloped and developing African, Caribbean, and south and southeast Asian countries, which are entirely dependent on Western capital, allowing Britain and other imperialist countries to plunder their natural resources, use them as cheap tourist destinations, and exploit their working classes in unbearable mines and sweatshops, while keeping most of the population in a state of extreme poverty.
Revolutionary theoreticians, most notably the pan-Africanist and Marxist political leader President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, call this new form of capitalist imperialism “neo-colonialism” — its final stage.
Crimes of Britain under Elizabeth’s rule
Elizabeth II received word of her father’s death and her ascension to the throne on February 6, 1952, while staying at a luxurious lodge in Kenya, then a British colony. The post-war Empire was in crisis — or rather, was suffering a series of crises, beginning with the decolonial revolutions that threatened British dominance across the globe. When Elizabeth Windsor (actually, Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, but the royal surname was changed in July of 1917 to distance the crown from the Kaiser, as well as the deposed Tsar of Russia) was crowned in 1953, decisions needed to be made. Far from being a passive observer of the monumental upheavals in the empire, Elizabeth was an active architect of the new form of empire — she served, during her exceptionally long reign, as the guiding hand behind the modern British dominion.
Later that same year, in October of 1952, an anti-colonial rebellion, led by the militaristic Mau Mau movement, swept across Kenya. In response, British colonial authorities declared a state of emergency. As a colony of the crown, the administrators of Kenya (like all the crown domains) were recommended to the monarch by the Civil Service Commission, but only served as a result of royal, crown orders: the so-called royal prerogative by which they were appointed and could be removed. To be perfectly clear: the continued service of the colonial authorities and civil servants, not only in Kenya but throughout the empire, was purely at the pleasure of the crown; Elizabeth II could have dismissed the men who were about to unleash a nightmare in Kenya. She could have recalled any of the men serving in the colonies during her reign. Crown colonies answer to the crown. She did not.
Those colonial authorities mobilized tens of thousands of troops and colonial police to put down the rebellion. By 1960, the Mau Mau movement had been crushed. British forces killed upwards of 20,000 civilians and freedom fighters, many of whom were tortured and raped. In a typical example of the British Empire’s racial policies, the official Corfield Report on the Mau Mau rebellion, prepared by the Queen’s government, described the insurgents as “mentally deranged Africans,” “dominated by bestial impulses and influenced by world communism,” who needed to be forcibly “detribalized” by working under European tutelage. However, though the rebellion was militarily crushed, it cost Britain over £55 million (around £1.4 billion today), and was disastrous for the land-grabbing white settler population in the Kenya colony. Ultimately, when anti-colonial resistance made the price of occupation greater than the economic benefits of exploitation via direct colonization, the crown was forced to concede to the aspirations of the Kenyan anti-colonial movement. Kenya finally gained its independence in 1963, and repudiated the British monarchy by becoming a republic in 1964 after electing its first Black-majority government.
The monarch inherited the so-called “Malayan Emergency” (the Anti-British National Liberation War), which had begun years before. On June 18, 1948, four years before her accession, His Majesty’s Government began a 12-year-long war against the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party. The MNLA waged a guerilla war against the occupying imperialists, attacking rubber plantations, police stations, and infrastructure in an effort to cost the imperialists and drive them out.
After Elizabeth took the throne, her government waged a scorched-earth terror campaign in Malaya. Colonial troops, in her name and under her banner, razed the houses and farms of anyone suspected of aiding the MNLA and forcibly relocated some 400,000–1 million people into concentration camps. Under orders from the colonial government, the soldiers sprayed Malayan fields with Agent Orange to starve out the “insurgency.”
The colonial authority rounded up and executed countless Malayans without trial or even formal charges or arrest. At Batang Kali, in December of 1948, a regiment of Scots Guards massacred 24 unarmed villagers suspected of being Communists. For the next sixty years, the public demanded accountability for this heinous crime. Investigations were blocked by the Foreign Office and prosecutions were refused by Her Majesty’s prosecutors. In June of 1993, Queen Elizabeth denied a petition for a new investigation into the massacre. This should come as no surprise: she was protecting her father and his government the same way the Foreign Office would when it destroyed colonial documentation of the government’s crimes at the close of decolonization.
She failed to put a stop to the crimes in Malaya — crimes which she was undoubtedly aware of through the detailed civil service records submitted by the colonial administrators to their queen.
Yet another “emergency” reared its head in 1955 (so-called by the royal government because the insurers in London would not cover civil wars) — the Greek Cypriot War of Independence. The island of Cyprus was claimed by the British as spoils at the close of World War One and in 1925 it was declared a crown colony — that is, a direct possession of the monarchy, subject to Orders in Council and the Foreign Service, and not governed by the British Parliament. Although many Greek Cypriots longed for reunification with Greece and although Greece repeatedly approached the crown to reintegrate the territory, Elizabeth refused again and again. Lack of investment in the island’s infrastructure and the crown policy to transfer the office of the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, from Suez to Cyprus, gave the embattled nationalists the momentum to begin the war. Fighting continued from 1955-1959, with the British colonial troops committing massacres, torture, and widespread rape.
Upon Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, young Evagoras Pallikarides, then fifteen years old, tore down the Union Jack raised at his school, like all schools on the island. After fighting in the war for the independence of his people for years, he was captured by British troops and tried for the murder of a British informant. “I know you will sentence me to death,” he said in his 1956 trial, at the age of eighteen, “but whatever I did, I did as a Cypriot who wants his liberty.” Queen Elizabeth, although she had the power to pardon him, declined to act. On March 14, 1957, he was hanged by Her Majesty’s Government. At the time of his death he was nineteen years old.
The British army remains on the island of Cyprus to this day, seventy years later. On September 9, when they were asked to stand silent and mourn her, crowds in Cyprus refused; her colonies remember Elizabeth’s crimes.
Elizabeth II was the reigning monarch of the Union of South Africa, a “herrenvolk” constitutional monarchy, from her accession until 1961, when South Africa became a herrenvolk republic. She ruled as head of state of an apartheid government for 13 years. Not once did she act to attack apartheid, the regime of racial separation that prevailed in the Union and later Republic of South Africa.
In the late 1950s, in the imperial British protectorate of Nyasaland (now Malawai), the Nyasaland African Congress protested against the British imposition of a federation with white settler-dominated Southern and Northern Rhodesia. What was Her Majesty’s Government’s response? The cold-blooded murder of fifty Africans. The pattern by now is clear. No “soft touch” monarch, Elizabeth permitted full leash to her colonial governments to murder, rape, and destroy her subjects with impunity so long as they did it in the name of colonial unity. It was this atrocity in Nyasaland, not any good nature on the part of the imperial monarch, that triggered the withdrawal of eleven colonies in the years thereafter.
In 1962, after the death of King Ahmed of Yemen, a civil war broke out between nationalists (backed by Nasser), who declared a republic, and royalists, who were supported by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan. Her Majesty’s Government proclaimed non-intervention from London while secretly financing and supplying fighter jets to the royalists. Airwork Services, a British defense company, trained Saudi royalist pilots.
Why? Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister, told John Kennedy that the British Empire would ensure that the “new Yemeni regime were occupied with their own internal affairs during the next few years” because they wanted “a weak government in Yemen not able to make trouble.”
What of Britain’s longest colonial shame, Ireland? Under Elizabeth’s watch, on January 30, 1972, the British military opened fire on a march in Derry protesting the passage of British legislation that permitted the jailing of Irish nationalists without due process or trial, shooting 26 marchers and killing 14.
We are told that the Queen was a “quiet supporter” of many “progressive” positions. She was a “quiet supporter” of gay liberation, they say. She was a “quiet supporter,” they say, of many things; she, the head of state, one of the architects of the neo-colonial Commonwealth, “quietly” supported many people. So quietly, in fact, that she never made a policy decision or spoke out about them in any way. So quietly, that she took her “support” to her grave.
Anti-Democracy and the Crown
Over and above her noxious assistance for some of the worst human rights abuses of the later 20th century and her position as head of state and reigning monarch of a capitalist-imperialist empire, beyond her as a person, the institution of the monarchy remains a powerful reactionary anchor for anti-democratic trends in United Kingdom’s government. So long as the monarchy, its obscene wealth, its hereditary head-of-state, and the royal prerogative and privy council continue to exist, the United Kingdom will never fully transition into a bourgeois democracy, let alone will it ever be a democracy for the people.
Far from the toothless, one is tempted to say emasculated, position depicted in television shows like Netflix’s The Crown, the monarch (and by extension the royal family) is far from “merely” one of the wealthiest people in the world, a figurehead with no power other than a grotesque degree material wealth. (Does it bear mentioning that this wealth is often physically embodied in looted artifacts from conquered cultures, one of the Empire’s favorite pastimes?)
The royal family controls somewhere in excess of $28 billion USD in assets, and the crown itself is tax-exempt. It was Elizabeth II who spent some of that money in 1973 to lobby the government to exempt the royal family from revealing its wealth to the public; in her interest, the police have been barred from searching the Queen’s private estates for stolen or looted artifacts, exempted from environmental laws, and so on. This concentration of wealth is not the greatest in the UK, but it is part-and-parcel with the types of wealth hoarded there: old money, in the hands of hereditary nobility.
As hereditary head-of-state, the monarch is unaccountable to the people. This important government position comes with the old constitutional law of the royal prerogative tucked in its pocket. That is, the legal authority for much of the government of the UK still flows from the absolute authority of the monarch. The monarch retains the power to dissolve Parliament, the elective body that is meant to represent the people of the UK. The monarch may appoint anyone they desire to serve as prime minister, even if there are now “customs” associated with whom and how. The monarch can unilaterally engage in diplomacy, cede territory, and regulate official colonies. All prosecutions in the UK are performed in the name of the crown. The monarch remains commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and can grant honours, titles, and ecclesiastical appointments in addition to appointing officers in the UK’s military.The monarch may also issue laws through the Privy Council; these “Orders in Council” bypass the Parliament and stand as laws as surely as any statute.
A British Republic?
No republic, bourgeois or otherwise, can stand at the mercy of a monarch. Though England was seized with revolutionary violence like the other European countries, its revolution was perpetually delayed; rather than transition to a bourgeois-capitalist republic, the reactionary fortress of the noble class salvaged the feudal project — and in so doing, wrested power from the monarch and transformed the absolutist kingdom into a so-called “constitutional monarchy.” As a result, unlike the other European powers, England (and the subsequent United Kingdom formed out of the violent agglomeration of Wales and Scotland) has remained in essence a monarchy, the contradictions of its ruling classes mediated through Parliament — the needs of the old merchant-capitalist class and the old nobility embodied in the House of Commons and the House of Lords respectively.
Elizabeth successfully piloted the monarchy into a new era, one in which its powers are largely unquestioned. Like the empire she helped to hide, the monarchy now has an aura of quaintness about it, as though it has passed on to a more democratic form. In reality, the naked sword of power has been sheathed and other, more subtle means, have been employed. The iron fist is still here; it does not change its nature merely because it hides within the velvet glove.
It is easy for us in the U.S. to mistake the British monarchy as a bourgeois institution. The U.S. media treats the royal family as merely a curious set of hyper-wealthy celebrities, in the same way the U.S. media portrays its own hyper-wealthy. The bourgeoisie disguise their political influence by presenting themselves (and being presented by the media) as feckless celebrities. It is not so. The British monarchy is the last redoubt of feudalist absolutism, and the existence of the monarchy continues to protect the feudal holdouts of the remaining nobility and large landlords. The crown has, under Elizabeth, successfully hitched itself to bourgeois capital while remaining above it.
Communism, which seeks to abolish the advantages of the few over the many, which puts into the hands of the many the power to govern their own destiny, which is itself the most complete democracy as it destroys the material barriers to the exercise of the people’s power and places the workers before the very levers of authority, is naturally republican. The destruction of monarchy, its total abolition in all and every form, is a necessary adjunct of Communism. Monarchy is itself, in as pure an expression as can be found, the privilege of the few elite over the many toiling masses; it is the incarnation of social hierarchy: unjust, maintained by brutal force, and the self-justifying principle of exploitation, theft, and rapine.
As committed social democrats, as committed republicans of the people’s voice, we must all rise and say “no more parasites; no more sovereigns” and bid Elizabeth II an ignominious farewell. We hope (and we must take steps toward the hoping) that she is the very last of the British monarchs — that the earth will never again be tormented, first upon its face and then within its bosom, with the presence of a thing so vile as a British monarch.
