I’ve been following the online debate over the slogan “no kings” with some interest.

On the one side, critics argue that it’s a normie notion, which obscures all sorts of questions about imperial war, Palestine, oil, and oligarchy.

On the other side, defenders say it appeals to a broad set of values and voters, providing the basis for a popular movement against not just Trump but all the ills he stands for and promotes, not to mention the kind of state he is trying to create and consolidate.

Interestingly enough, as Bruno Leipold shows in his magnificent book, Citizen Marx, Marx struggled with this very question across the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. While most readers associate Marx with the claim that liberal democracy is the political form of capitalism, Marx was in fact quite attuned to the persistent appeal of monarchy, in its regnant or returning form, as a political framework for capitalism. And while leftists often see his writings on monarchy solely through the lens of Bonapartism—that is, of a mass leader whose populist authoritarianism prefigures fascism and Trumpism—Leipold brings out a different Marxist rumination on monarchy.

Citizen Marx thought that monarchies cast a “feudal halo” over capitalist societies, providing the bourgeoisie, in times of crisis, with the perfect “crowned scapegoat” to blame for all the mischief capitalism had made. The task for Marx was to create a democracy—with universal franchise among adult men, the greatest concentration of power in the legislature, radical limitations on the bureaucracy and the executive, robust forms of recall and referendum, and widespread and active participation in society and the state. In such a polity, the bourgeoisie would have to “confront the subjugated classes and contend without mediation, without the concealment afforded by the crown.” There are reasons, Marx writes, that the bourgeoisie “yearns for” the monarchy’s “more incomplete, more undeveloped and precisely on that account less dangerous forms of rule.” One of them is that the struggles of the working class will only “increase in importance in proportion as we leave behind us the realm of absolute monarchy.”