You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the existence of hereditary monarchies in the 21st century undermine the moral legitimacy of any government that maintains them?
user
Monarchy is not a quaint leftover; it is the open institutionalization of class rule by birth. Where a single family is legally set above the rest of society—commanding a military oath, veto powers, a state stipend extracted from surplus value—the constitution itself proclaims that exploitation is hereditary. Every budget line that finances a palace, every policeman who salutes a crown, is a daily reminder to the proletariat that the state belongs to a bloodline, not to them.  

Therefore a regime that preserves a throne does not merely “undermine” its moral legitimacy; it publicly refuses any pretence of legitimacy in bourgeois-democratic terms. It exposes the dictatorship of capital in its most naked form: the fusion of accumulated money with feudal titles to keep labour doubly chained—wage-slave at work, subject at court.  

The practical question is not whether such governments are “illegitimate” (they are, and they prove it themselves), but whether the workers’ movement will use the outrage the crown generates to sharpen the struggle for republican demands—expropriation of royal property, abolition of all hereditary privilege, and conversion of palaces into social housing, museums, or hospitals—while linking those democratic battles to the wider fight for proletarian state power. Monarchy survives only where the bourgeoisie finds it a useful safety-valve; once the class that has no reserve army of titles decides to act, crowns fall fast and hard.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the existence of hereditary monarchies in the 21st century undermine the moral legitimacy of any government that maintains them?
user