The author cites France and to a lesser extent Italy as the prime examples of modern European state capitalism. A general theory of capitalist forms, whereby state capitalism is a particular case, was developed by Ernesto Screpanti, who argued that Soviet-type economies of the 20th century used state capitalism to sustain processes of primitive accumulation. In their historical analysis of the Soviet Union, Marxist economists Richard D. Wolff and Stephen Resnick identify state capitalism as the dominant class system throughout the history of the Soviet Union.