The Royal Fairy Tales

Kings and queens exist because other people treat them as regal not because there is something intrinsic or magical about the royal person which makes them a monarch. It is the willingness of people to kneel before them and pay homage. In contemporary Britain, this willingness does not directly turn into political power, but a much more nebulous symbolic one. Through the imagery and supposed emotions directly fixed on the monarchy by "the people", British capitalism can present itself as being able to maintain a community of values. Something other than mere profit-seeking matters. Royalty underpins a whole system of social stratification and value.

With this royal wedding we are once more subjected to no end of absurd and expensive pageantry with the usual TV documentaries and magagzine features, all giving the line that our glorious monarchy is the centre of our “identity” and political stability. Such pageantry as we see today is no more than the creation of 19th century efforts to establish an imperial and domestic symbolic loyalty around a “regal” figurehead external to “politics”.

Does monarchy serve any interest for ordinary people, beyond giving a holiday and a pageant now and then? It may be said that if it does them no good, it does them no harm either. If it were true that to fill people’s heads with nonsense did no harm, that might be so; and most of it is nonsense. There is no reason for thinking that the Queen or Will and Kate are not pleasant, decent people. If things were otherwise, however, the truth is that they would still be presented as paragons. Some monarchs have been cruel, irresponsible and contemptible, but their subjects have still been asked for loyal reverence. It is not the monarch that is at fault in all this, but the social system which needs a shining symbol; where there is no monarch, something else has to be held up to dazzle the dispossessed. However, recently press voyeurism has undermined its previously cultivated image of a wholesome family example. The marriage infidelities of the heir to the throne and wife ( of the four categories of treason remaining from the Treason Act of 1351 there is still the offence of “violating” the wife of the monarchs eldest son, which may have caused some lost sleep among the men who consorted with Princess Diana while she was still married to the Prince of Wales.) Thus could the Yorks and Wessexes also seek to trade off the royal brand in their business dealings.

A monarch, in the popular mind, rules by divine sanction and in accordance with custom from the mists of time. The capitalists, on the other hand, have no ancient usage behind them, no special appointment from heaven. Unless they can disguise the fact of their dominance, they are clearly seen to rule by might alone – a perpetual challenge to might. A ruling class which has to confess that it rules because it possesses the means of life, already has one foot in the grave, for it holds shines a light on a class cleavage that all men may see. This is perhaps the real use of monarchs in capitalism. Behind the person of the Royal Personage, the capitalists can hide the fact that it is they in reality who rule. By parading the Royal Family before the workers at every possible opportunity, and with every circumstance of pomp and display that their ingenuity can invent, by investing them with divine right and something of divinity itself, the capitalists awaken and stimulate and nurture that spirit of reverence which is so deadly an enemy to the growth of revolutionary ideas, and so detract attention from themselves.

As it is to the interest of the capitalist class to represent that they, together with the working class, are subservient to a greater power, and to set the example of loyalty to their king, it becomes the imperative duty of socialists to strip the sham of all its disguising tinsel, and to expose the grim, sordid, unromantic, iron form of tyrant King Capital beneath it all. No royal power exists today . Everywhere the owners of the means of production have either bent the monarchy to their will or broken it. Power lies alone with the class of property-owners. They rule who own. The whole of this inglorious show, indeed, is subordinate to this object. It is not just only an effort to solidify and make more stable the monarchy, but to blind the workers to their true position, and make capitalist domination more secure.

“The royal wedding is a powerful and engaging fantasy,” says Diane Reay, professor of education at Cambridge university. It represents “the idea that anyone can become a princess – that, like Cinderella, we can all move up the social and economic ladder”.
Middleton’s parents met when working for British Airways – father Michael as a dispatcher and mother Carole as a flight attendant. Carole’s great-grandfather was a Durham miner, working in a pit owned by the Bowes-Lyons, the late Queen Mother’s family. His father worked in the pits, as did his father before him. In practice, of course, Kate Middleton is no Cinderella. Her father’s background is solidly middle-income (his father was a Royal Air Force pilot, from a family of Leeds solicitors and merchants). Party Pieces, the children’s entertainment business he and his wife founded, enriched the Middletons, enabling them to buy a rambling house in the affluent home county of Berkshire as well as a property in Chelsea, home to American bankers and the London base for faded gentry. Kate and her two siblings attended Marlborough, a top fee-paying school where Princess Eugenie of York, William’s cousin, was also a pupil. She went on to university at St Andrews in Scotland – best known for being the home of golf. The university’s reputation is stronger on social than academic selection; its principal boasted at Kate and William’s graduation ceremony that it was “the top matchmaking university in Britain”.
“Let’s face it,” says Prof Reay. “The prince would not be marrying a girl from a comprehensive state school.”

Socialists are unconcern as to whether we live in a republic or a constitutional monarchy – capitalism is capitalism whatever its political label. We must, however, point out the worst lies told about the history of our class. Constitutional monarchy has not always been a comfortable political framework for British capitalism and has always had its critics, including a minority of republicans. Socialists desire a good deal more than a mere capitalist republic. Unlike the Left of capitalism, we openly advocate common ownership and democratic control which, for the privileged royal parasites, would mean the end of their vast ownership of resources and their place as sources of political deference and patronage.

It is time we, the working class, rather than the royal nuptials of Will and Kate, celebrated something of far more importance - ourselves! It seems we have been convinced for so long that we should look up to our "betters" and to celebrate their shenanigans, brainwashed into thinking the same by the fawning media, that we have forgotten our own collective strength and our latent power to change the world.