Istvan Meszaros

In Bobbio’s view, Marx and subsequent Marxian theorists, such as Lenin, Luxemburg, and Gramsci, had developed criticisms of the capitalist state from the standpoint of the human “subject,” but their analysis displayed a lack of consideration of concrete “institutions” and the nature of the state under socialism.

Further, the Marxian argument on the “withering away” of the state was seen by Bobbio as lacking any contemporary significance

Italian Marxist Lucio Colletti, decrying the “lack of a theory of the socialist state or socialist democracy as an alternative to the theory, or theories of the bourgeois state and bourgeois democracy.”