Abstract

In this contribution, we try to relate Poulantzas’s theses concerning the State and democratic socialism with the political and ideological movement known as Eurocommunism. Poulantzas’s theses arose in a context in which the strategy and the debate about democratic transition to socialism in Western Europe intersects the possibility to coming to power for the Italian and French communist parties. The Poulantzas’s thought had its systematization in State, Power, Socialism. When the book was published the Eurocommunist movement was already in crisis. Poulantzas’s analyses concerning the relationship between representative democracy and direct democracy, those on the social subjects of revolutionary transformation, and the attempt to rethinking the question of transition to socialism beyond the schemes fixed by the Third International’ Marxism, represent an important contribution to understand the debate within European left, but also to understand the transformations of Western capitalist countries at the end of the Golden Age.