ABSTRACT
Relatively detailed Marxist accounts of how state institutions operate have emerged only in the post-war period, and are associated chiefly with the growth of Western neo-Marxisms – new forms of expressing Marx and Engels’ ideas, distinguished chiefly by their willingness to engage ‘bourgeois’ social science directly in debate. While orthodox Marxist-Leninism of the Comintern period offered no serious accounts of liberal democratic practices and institutions, neo-Marxists have tried to come to terms with phenomena which classical Marxists did not anticipate, especially the advent of some form of mixed economy and the growth of an extended welfare state in every advanced capitalist society. Previous Marxist descriptions of the democratic state as a nakedly repressive apparatus attuned only to the behests of capitalists sat unsatisfactorily with the apparent emergence of government planning and ‘caring capitalism’, at least in the period from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. The emergence of new-right governments in the 1980s has called in question the previous welfare consensus, and apparently signalled a drive towards the ‘recommodification’ of areas of social life previously handled by public policy decision. But no attempt to dismantle radically the fabric of state regulation or public service provision has yet been pushed through in any liberal democracy, so that the public policy configuration now remains quite distinct from that prevailing before 1945.
