Neoliberalism as a state-centric class project: The Italian case

This essay sheds light on the neoliberal aspects of the Italian political-economic system exemplified in the relationship between capital, state and media. The main argument is that the specific marriage between neoliberalism and neocorporatism that characterizes Italy reveals a distinctive characteristic of neoliberalism: a class project relying heavily on the state. As Polanyi has suggested through the concept of 'embeddedness', capitalism has consistently developed through the double movement of preaching the independence of the free market from the state and requiring the state's protectionist interventions. After describing this state-centric framework to interpret neoliberalism, in the second part of the paper, I consider the political-economic history of Italy's recent decades, paying particular attention to the media system. I will examine the 'communicative performance' of neoliberalism in Berlusconi's discourses and concrete political decisions taken in the name of neoliberalism. The articulated relationship between media and politics reveals the continuous attempts by the advocates of neoliberalism to seize the state, not to reduce its intervention but in fact to manipulate the market.