A. James Gregor: Socialism

“On November 24, 1914, when he was expelled from the Socialist Party, Mussolini insisted that his expulsion could not divest him of his ‘socialist faith.’ He made the subtitle of his new paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, ‘A Socialist Daily.’ National intervention in the European conflagration was an immediate issue and as a problem it divided socialists, but since most continental socialist parties had opted for war, Mussolini conceived at that time that interventionism was not a commitment sufficient to require the abandonment of socialism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 141

War , Faith , Problem , Time

“However extensively Lenin was prepared to creatively develop the Marxism he inherited, he was not prepared to ‘skip stages’ in achieving socialism. Socialism required, as prerequisite, the modernization and industrial development of its economic base. To create the missing material prerequisites, Lenin was prepared to fall back on a centrally supervised market-influenced program of state capitalism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Marxism, Fascism & Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism, (2008), p. 56

“By the time Spirito delivered his communications at the Convention of 1932, these sentiments had united with neo-idealist totalitarian aspirations. The result was variously identified as ‘Fascist communism,’ Fascist Bolshevism’ or ‘Fascist socialism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 296

Communication , Time

“Socialization was, in fact, the product of a maturation of trends already implicit in the earliest Fascist formulations. The trend that matured into socializations was already manifest by the time of the Second Convention of Syndical and Corporative Studies, held in Ferrara in May 1932. Its substance was provided by the persistent socialist and anti-bourgeois biases of radical national syndicalism conjoined with the totalitarian pretensions of neo-idealism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 293

Study , Time

“Gentile maintained, with Marx, that the ‘essence’ of man is not individual—but social. The human person is a function of a complex pattern of interactions with both nature and other persons in a law-and-rule-government environment. The human being is essentially a social creature (a Gemeinwesen)—and outside society, loses humanity.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 95

Law , Nature , Personality

“Fascism... was the socialism of ‘proletarian nations.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 135

“Mussolini insisted that Fascism was the only form of ‘socialism’ appropriate to the ‘proletarian nations’ of the twentieth century.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 191 (footnote 26).

“Mussolini's revolutionary nationalism, while it distinguished itself from the traditional patriotism and nationalism of the bourgeoisie, displayed many of those features we today identify with the nationalism of underdeveloped peoples. It was an anticonservative nationalism that anticipated vast social changes; it was directed against both foreign and domestic oppressors; it conjured up an image of a renewed and regenerated nation that would perform a historical mission; it invoked a moral ideal of selfless sacrifice and commitment in the service of collective goals; and it recalled ancient glories and anticipated a shared and greater glory.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, (1979), p. 99

People , Change

“What should be recognized at this point is the fact that Mussolini, whatever else he was, was a collectivist, who conceived human beings as social animals. He had learned that man was a communal being from Marx.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 55

Communication , Learning , Animals

“Fascism itself was a variant of Sorelian syndicalism which advertized itself as voluntaristic, neo-idealist and elitist socialism. This current of socialist thought neither Fascism nor Gentile ever rejected. ‘Fascism,’ Gentile insisted, ‘as a consequence of its Marxian and Sorelian patrimony... conjoined with the influence of contemporary Italian idealism, through which Fascist thought attained maturity, conceives philosophy as praxis.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 317

“Mussolini himself, before he knew who would collect around the standards of the new Fascist Republican Party, committed himself to the realization of the original syndicalist and neo-idealist program of Fascism. His original intention was to call his new republic the Italian Socialist Republic—which nonetheless advertised itself as the vehicle of an Italian socialism, a national socialism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 307

“Stalin, in turn, transformed Marxism into a rationale for national socialism… Leon Trotsky was equally quick to condemn the advocacy of socialism in one country, a commitment which further eroded classical Marxism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 359

Country

“Thus, though the Fascist conception of property refused to countenance collective possession as such, individual ownership rights were understood to be strictly subordinate to collective discipline. It was not the individual ownership of property that concerned Fascists, but it subordination to collective control. Property was understood to perform social functions rather than to manifest individual rights. It was clear that the conception of property as a social function was broad enough to include socialization of the means of production, should that be required by the national interests as interpreted by the state.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 305

“By the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, Stalin had created a regime that had abandoned every principle that had presumably typified left-wing aspirations and had given himself over to notions of ‘socialism in one country’ — with all the attendant attributes: nationalism, the leadership principle, anti-liberalism, anti-individualism, communitarianism, hierarchical rule, missionary zeal, the employment of violence to assure national purpose, and anti-Semitism — making the Soviet Union unmistakenly ‘a cousin to the German National Socialism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), pp. 4-5

Country

“By the end of the 1960's, Soviet theoreticians were prepared to argue that the 'Chinese leadership' had transformed itself into an ‘anti-Marxist, anti-socialist, chauvinistic and anti-Soviet… bourgeois-nationalistic’ movement of reaction… In their account, Soviet thinkers had recourse to the same list of descriptive traits that Western academics had employed for some considerable time to identify fascist political and social systems.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 71

Time

“The individual was the state, and the state was Italy, and Italy was Fascism, and Mussolini was all of them. Such a series of substitutions constitutes the sustaining logic of charismatic totalitarian socialism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 326

“Fascist social welfare legislation compared favorably with the more advanced European nations and in some respect was more progressive.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship, (1979), p. 263