This chapter discusses how contemporary Marxist writers have analysed liberal democratic politics in the advanced capitalist societies. It thus falls far short of a review of all Marxist political theory, since it leaves on one side the classical Marxist preoccupations with the prospects and mechanisms of revolutionary change (Miliband, 1977), and more recent work on the political process in less developed countries. Some restriction is clearly inevitable in dealing with a field of the richness and sophistication of Marxist political thought. But the particular justification for focusing on the "normal" political process in advanced capitalism is that it has constituted "the basic historical impasse that was the origin and matrix of Western Marxism itself (Anderson, 1976, p. 80).