“Mussolini was a Marxist ‘heretic.”

— A. James Gregor

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

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A. James Gregor 64

American political scientist 1929–2019

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“Whatever one thinks of his Marxism today, Mussolini was accepted by his socialist peers as a Marxist theoretician. He rose to leadership in the Italian Socialist Party at least in part on the basis of his recognized capacity as a socialist intellectual.”

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“Compliance with an authority is ingrained in the human condition. Statists of all stripes use this psychological technique to garner support for political conquests, domestic and foreign. These conquests mimic the historical policies of Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Russian Sovietism, which few scholars want to expose, especially when their own ideology stands in sharp accord with Fascist-Marxist mindset. Yet many political scientists go out of their way to misidentify or ignore the roots of Mussolini’s syndicalist, socialist, and Marxist ideology, perhaps because of their own closely held political beliefs. Whatever the reason, scholars have gone to great lengths to obscure Mussolini’s true Marxian intentions.”

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“The first Presbyterian was a heretic. The first Baptist was a heretic. The first Congregationalist was a heretic. The first Christian was denounced as a blasphemer. And yet these heretics, the moment they get numerous enough to be in the majority in some locality, begin to call themselves orthodox. Can there be any impudence beyond this?”

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“The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow.”

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"Tomorrow" (1919), as translated in A Soviet Heretic : Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg
Context: Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons. And grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers; the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers.
Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis.