ABSTRACT
This book starts from the basic intuition that the key to understanding the state in capitalism is to understand capital, its forms, its development, and its imperatives. While political struggles have their autonomous role, and institutions and ideological traditions shape political actors’ decisions, nonetheless economic forces are the basis upon which these factors operate. In spite of the strong Marxist political and intellectual tradition in Italy, this sort of analysis of Italian politics and policy-making has seldom been attempted. By beginning to fill this lacuna, we hope to provide the kind of confrontation with actual cases that is so necessary as a test of the many competing theoretical perspectives on the state and the determinants of policy-making. Marxist theories, in particular, have often suffered from their abstract character. And, while Marxists have always recognized the global character of the capitalist economy, its increasing internationalization makes it impossible to consider a national case in isolation, and requires an updating of the first generation of Marxist state theories to take full account of the insertion of both capital and the state in the international system.
