PARTISAN!

The Partisan Editorial Team introduce Partisan 4: Light & Air.

Small-scale protests and speak-outs against the monarchy were held across Australia during the visit of so-called “King” Charles Windsor last month. Many of these were organised by our own members in the RCO. The intention of these actions was to agitate the working class against the institution of the monarchy. Public speak-outs in Brisbane and Melbourne were organised and attended by a handful of RCO comrades on the first day of the royal visit to Australia. Our speak-outs called out the genocidal basis on which the monarchy was brought to Australia, and its legacy as a brutal vestige of feudalism. We did not echo calls from liberal republicans to simply exchange the monarch for an Australian President, but rather for the formation of a workers’ republic, in which the working class is the ruling class.

The republican struggle in Australia has largely died following the defeat of the 1999 referendum on an Australian republic. Mainstream liberal republican movements, both here and overseas, focus on the position of the monarch itself being undemocratic. Whilst this assessment is correct, they do not provide a program for a democratic project that addresses the undemocratic nature of the capitalist “democracy” modern monarchs preside over.

Majority rule is not possible when producers are excluded from the means of production. The struggle for a democratic republic needs to be emphasised as the form of rule of the working class. It is through this formation that collective ownership of the means of production can be attained, and the capitalist era can be consigned to history. This edition of the Partisan, Partisan 4: Light & Air, covers the proletarian struggle for democracy, and discusses ways forward for the Real movement.