ABSTRACT
The previous chapter has outlined the ‘production profile’ of Italian capitalism, and described its principal fractions. However, any description would be incomplete without any reference to the large literature in political economy on the various ‘models’ of capitalism that different authors have identified.1 Much has been written about the differences between Anglo-Saxon, market-dominated, deregulated capitalism and the ‘Rhenish model’ or ‘social market’ economy of Germany and similar continental states, characterized by corporatist industrial relations and bank involvement in industry. Some typologies add a separate Asian model, while others include a state-led form of capitalism embracing the East Asian economies (and France before 1981).2 These models differ significantly in the political relationships between capital, the working class, and the state which accompany them. The Regulation School has given rise to another, only partially overlapping, family of models, centred around the distinction between Fordism and different varieties of post-Fordism.3 There have been, however, few discussions of Italy in this debate,4 in spite of its significance as a country in which the class struggle has known moments of great tension, and the working class has developed sophisticated programmes and methods of struggle against capitalist hegemony. The analysis of the last two chapters suggests that Italian capitalism does indeed possess significant peculiarities, and that a single, one-size-fits-all theory of the capitalist state is insufficient to account for the Italian case, where capital is politically weak and has relied to a significant degree on state support. Hence in this chapter we shall discuss the value of the literature on models of capitalism and then critique the manner in which it has been applied until now to the Italian case, in order to arrive at a characterization of the form of capitalism in Italy.
