Uneasy lies the head...

 Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is the first member of the Royal Family to be arrested since Charles Stuart was held by the New Model Army at the end of the First Civil War in 1646. Charles remained in custody before his trial and execution in 1649. The Republic of England, or Commonwealth as it was styled in English, was proclaimed soon after. Oliver Cromwell, the MP for Huntingdon who was the leading Parliamentary commander during the civil war,
later became head of state, the Lord Protector, a post he held until his death in 1658. 
Andrew’s arrest is not going to bring down the House of Windsor nor is he likely to share the fate of his loathsome predecessor. Nevertheless the high-life of the former prince that revolved around Jeffrey Epstein, a degenerate American brothel keeper who supplied young girls to prominent politicians and businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic, has brought the Royal Family into disrepute not seen since the Abdication crisis of 1936.
In those days the bourgeois parliament and the leaders of the Church of England believed that Edward V111’s morals and his sympathy for Nazi Germany made him unfit to head the Anglican church let alone an Empire that spanned a quarter of the entire world. These days Andrew’s antics have merely embarrassed our current king, who’s clearly washed his hands on his errant younger brother.
The monarchy, of course, is part and parcel of British bourgeois democracy. During Elizabeth 11’s long reign they built up a cult around the House of Windsor based on two powerful myths – the first being that the Royal Family are paragons of virtue and the second that they have no power at all in the modern British state. Neither is true.
The first is blatantly obvious. The second ignores the nature of the bourgeois state and the role of the ruling family that heads it. To be sure, the Westminster parliament is a sovereign assembly that can pick and chose monarchs – it got rid of James 11 in 1688. It forced Edward out in 1936. The monarch is, on the face of it, a figurehead, But at the end of the day it is absurd to think that the House of Windsor, one of the richest families in the world, has no power at all.
New voices are now questioning the role of the monarchy – a natural feature of the early days of British communism. There were also outspoken republicans in the social-democratic movement like Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone. Even some right-wing social-democrats like Willie Hamilton, the Fife MP who branded the royal family gold-plated scroungers joined in the calls for the monarchy to be scrapped. But republicanism was barely, if ever, mentioned during the post-war decline of the revisionist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Calls for a democratic republic were said to be “divisive” given the supposed popularity of the monarchy amongst the working class and irrelevant in the forward march of labour that was conjured up in the British Road to Socialism.
Our position, from the day we were founded is clear. The New Communist Party calls for the abolition of the Crown, the House of Lords and all titles of nobility. They serves no democratic purpose whatsoever. 

Epstein scandal an offspring of capitalism

 by Nikos Mottas
 
The Epstein scandal is persistently described as a “dark anomaly,” a moral rupture inside an otherwise functioning system. This description is false. What it conceals is more important than what it reveals. The affair did not expose a deviation from capitalism but one of its normal, if usually less visible, operations. By treating Epstein as an exception, bourgeois discourse shields the system that made him possible.
Jeffrey Epstein was not an outsider who infiltrated elite circles. He operated comfortably within them, because capitalism systematically produces both extreme vulnerability at one pole and extreme impunity at the other. Where wealth is concentrated, power follows; where power follows, accountability retreats. This is not corruption of the system. It is the system functioning according to its own laws.
Capitalism rests on exploitation presented as free exchange. The worker “chooses” to sell labour-power only because material conditions leave no alternative. Marx described this contradiction with precision when he noted that the sphere of exchange appears as “a very Eden of the innate rights of man” while in reality it conceals relations of domination. Formal equality masks material coercion. As Marx put it bluntly “between equal rights, force decides.” In capitalist society, that force is economic necessity, socially organised and legally protected.
This coercion extends far beyond the workplace. It penetrates education, housing, healthcare, and personal relationships. When higher education is transformed into an individual investment rather than a social right, capitalism does not merely abandon young people – it actively pushes them toward market solutions for survival. The outcome is not accidental. It is systemic.
In recent years, advertising campaigns in European cities (Paris, Brussels, Stockholm etc) openly promoted the idea that students could solve their financial problems by entering “relationships” with wealthy older men who would cover university costs. The message was explicit: financial relief in exchange for intimacy, presented as personal choice and empowerment. This was not criminal underground activity. It was publicly advertised, legally defended, and normalised. Here the ethics of capitalism reveal themselves not as abstract principles but as concrete practice: when social provision is dismantled, the market advances – even into the most intimate spheres of life.
This phenomenon is not separate from the Epstein affair. It is its everyday, legalised expression. In both cases, inequality produces dependence, and dependence is converted into access. What differs is scale and visibility, not substance. The student pushed toward transactional intimacy and the victim exploited by elite trafficking networks occupy different positions within the hierarchy, but both are shaped by the same social relation: vulnerability confronting power under conditions falsely described as choice.
Engels observed that bourgeois society dissolves human relations into cash relations. When everything becomes a commodity, the human body is not exempt. Capitalism does not invent predatory behaviour, but it organises society so that predation is facilitated by wealth and protected by impunity. The Epstein network did not endure because institutions were absent, but because class power neutralised them. Law, media, and politics operate selectively, disciplining the powerless while shielding the powerful through delay, silence, and controlled exposure.
For this reason, liberal outrage leads nowhere. By reducing the issue to individual depravity or ethical failure, it obscures the social relations that reproduce exploitation. Calls for better regulation, transparency, or moral accountability do not touch the core. Exploitation cannot be regulated away because it is structural. A system built on inequality cannot eliminate predation; it can only manage its visibility.
Epstein was not a glitch. He was a function. Those who insist on seeing an ‘aberration’ are not misunderstanding reality; they are actually defending it. The real scandal is not that such crimes happened – but that capitalism makes them possible, profitable, and repeatable.
IDoC

Goodbye Mandelson

Peter Mandelson has at last left the Labour Party. Brought down by the Epstein dossier, his reputation in tatters, his departure follows his earlier resignation as British ambassador in Washington and his more recent departure from the House of Lords.This week’s finale was an inevitable but grudging acceptance by Tony Blair’s chief henchman that his political career is over. No one cares.
No one is going to miss this venal schemer who wore his corruption as a badge of honour throughout the Blairite days when he was known as the “Prince of Darkness” by friend and foe alike.
His enemies, and they are legion, rejoice at his downfall. His “friends”, like Starmer who relied on Mandelson and the other ageing Blairites to keep him in office, now disown him. Mandelson was an icon for the right-wing social democrats that hounded Corbyn, Livingstone and thousands of others out of the Labour Party.
Now Starmer claims he didn’t know the extent of Mandelson’s dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted brothel keeper who supplied young girls to prominent politicians and businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic and died in unusual circumstances in a New York jail in 2019. 
Starmer thinks he can weather the storm if he can hold on to Gorton & Denton in the by-election this month. But he’s got the Faragists and the Greens snapping at his heels while the Tories clamour for a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons to bring down his floundering government. Starmer, of course, must go. And the sooner the better. But who will replace him?
Starmer’s cohorts, who dominate the Parliamentary Labour Party, is in a dilemna. They argue that the only alternative to a Labour government is one led by Nigel Farage – who is certainly no friend of the labour movement. They liken the Corbynistas and the Greens to the “lunatic fringe” and still believe in Blair’s “New Labour” mantras of “new world order” capitalism and crawling to American imperialism – even though capitalism doesn’t work except for the immensely rich and the Americans neither need nor want their “special relationship” these days.
Their chosen successor, Wes Streeting, was a protege of the digraced Mandelson. And none of  the others in Starmer’s faction are capable of holding the highest office in the land.
Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham wait in the wings to pick up the pieces when Starmer inevitably goes. But though they can campaign on the street – unlike the totally useless Starmer – their outlook differs little from the general right-wing Labour milieu they came from in the first place. They pay lip-service to the trade union bureaucrats who run the TUC and most of the unions in the country. But that’s as far as it goes – and as far as it will ever go as long as the careerists and time-servers remain in charge. That’s where the struggle for socialism must begin anew – and it must start now...