Most readers and followers of Marx are familiar with two fairly simple and stereotypical versions of his theory of the capitalist state.

The first, which can be gleaned from On the Jewish Question and other writings, essentially sees the liberal constitutional state, with a rule of law and various civil liberties, as the perfected form of the capitalist state.

The second, which can be gleaned from the Eighteenth Brumaire, sees a populist dictator, like Louis Bonaparte, as a different, more authoritarian version of the capitalist state.

But in reading and re-reading Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx, I think we can find, in Marx’s other writings, particularly his articles on 1848, some of which were later collected in The Class Struggles in France, a third, less familiar Marxist account of the capitalist state.

But, first, let’s recount the first standard Marxist account of the bourgeois state, which Marx develops throughout the 1840s and applies to what happened in France in 1848.

Until 1848, Marx argues, there were two factions of the bourgeoisie—the landed bourgeoisie and the industrial/financial bourgeoisie—in France. Each faction lined up behind different columns of French royalism. One faction—the industrial/financial—stood with the Orléanists of the July Monarchy. A second faction—the landed (formerly the aristocracy but now purely bourgeois)—stood behind the Bourbons of the Restoration Monarchy.

For decades before 1848, both factions had been battling each other, thinking that they needed their specific king, their specific royal house, in power to protect their interests.

After 1848, both factions made a remarkable discovery, which is the key to the capitalist state: If you can depersonalize the state apparatus by creating a republic, if you remove the monarchy, capital itself can rule across the entire state. “In the bourgeois republic, which bore neither the name Bourbon nor the name Orléans, but the name Capital, they had found the form of state in which they could rule conjointly.” Instead of fighting with each other over which house will rule, both factions are now happy and protected in their mutual house of capital.

This is how Marx puts it in the Eighteenth Brumaire:

Whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king [before 1848], the whole of the bourgeoisie will now [after 1848] rule in the name of the people.

The republic, in this view, is the perfected political form of the bourgeoisie.

In making this argument, Marx is criticizing erstwhile allies, including radical republicans like Heinzen, who had thought of the battle of 1848 as simply a battle between monarchy and the republic—a position, incidentally, that Marx himself had held until about five minutes before he didn’t hold it. The real battle, Marx now claims, is not between monarchy and a republic but between communism and capitalism, the workers and the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois state, the republic, is the perfect venue for that battle to play out.

But here Marx starts developing a different argument, this third argument that I mentioned at the outset, which Leipold presents traces of but doesn’t fully articulate or theorize as his own account of Marx. (I say this because I don’t want Leipold to be held responsible for what may just be my over-reading of the material.)

This third argument—which can be found, as I said, in the articles Marx wrote on 1848, some of which were later collected in The Class Struggles in France—goes like this.

Under non-republican regimes, by which Marx means absolute monarchy or constitutional monarchy, the domination of capitalism tends to disappear from public view. The monarchy has a “feudal halo that hid[es] the rule of the bourgeois class,” says Marx. Because bourgeois domination is hidden but present, affecting everyone’s lives without their quite seeing it, while the monarchy is visible and obvious, the monarchy offers the people a “crowned scapegoat” for the misery they suffer. It thus becomes a “lightning rod” for the people’s anger.

Under monarchy, in other words, capitalists dominate the system, but their domination is overshadowed and eclipsed by the more visible and obvious domination of the royal house. So long as we are fighting that visible and personal system of royal domination, Marx suggests, we’ll never get to the fight over the less visible domination of capitalism. It’s only when that visible form of royal domination recedes and the republic emerges, that the social question of capitalist domination can truly be seen and addressed.

Far from putting the bourgeoisie in a better position to dominate, the republic puts workers in a better position to challenge that domination. Not simply because it gives workers tools like the suffrage or freedom of speech and so on. But also because the republic “bares the head of the monster [of capitalist domination] by knocking off the crown which shielded and concealed it.”

For that reason, the bourgeoisie often wants to abandon the republic. It “yearns for the former more incomplete, more undeveloped and precisely on that account less dangerous forms of rule” under the monarchy. (This last is actually from the Eighteenth Brumaire.)

At the heart of the capitalist state, then, is not the constitutional or liberal republic we’re all accustomed to associate with the Marxist critique of the state. Instead, it’s the specter of older forms of personalist rule—not of a populist dictator like Louis Bonaparte, which we all know from Marxist writings on fascism, but instead something more like a pre-republican king.

Even if we don’t revert to such a monarchy, Marx provides us with a keen, and I think relevant, account of how simply having to fight over democracy versus monarchy, simply having a monarch to fight over, provides the bourgeoisie with a distracting scapegoat that the bourgeoisie is always happy to return to.

Maybe this is Marx’s most important contribution to a theory of the bourgeois state today: that the return to or the revived specter of the personalist rule of a king is what prevents us from having a confrontation over capitalism.