Despite the fact that no other country can boast TWO Epochs (Rome and the Rinascimento), Italy in recent centuries, has difficulty getting Respect.

In the last half century, two of the larger 'millstones" that have been hung around Italy's neck has been Fascism and Mussolini.

Reasonable criticisms can be leveled at both. However my contention is that both have been "Negatively Distorted" to "Mythic" proportions.

And anything that casts Italy in an unjustified unfavorable light concerns me greatly.
That which constitutes academic dishonesty, or even academic negligence also concerns me.

This two-part Report may startle you, (as the conclusions did me) and may even generate skepticism, but it is well referenced, and based on authoritative views!

The discussion was first precipitated by a Book Review of : "In Defense of Il Duce".

This Report may require you to completely REVERSE your thinking about
Fascism, and Mussolini, not so much in the deeds, but the philosophy.

The long-standing belief that Marxism and Fascism are ideologies on opposite
sides of the political spectrum is 180 degrees incorrect.

First, Mussolini was at least by 21 a Marxist, and became successively a member
of the Central Committee, editor of the official organ, Avanti!, spokesman of the internationalist left-wing, then became one of Italy's most prominent Marxist theoreticians and an intimate of Lenin.

After 1918, Italy was in chaos, with Communist upheavals everywhere. Mussolini initially expressed his sympathies for these upheavals but soon saw that they were reducing Italy to a form of anarchy that was helping no-one.

He therefore formed his "Fasci di combattimento"--mainly comprised in the beginning of fellow ex-servicemen -- to help restore order. This they did by force, breaking up the Socialist and Communist rallies, strikes and organizations. Internecine feuds between Leftists have always been common, however.

Nonetheless, Fascism was subversive in that it fought against the traditional Italian ruling elite. It was also subversive because of its desire to innovate in many ways
and to replace the existing ruling class with a new Fascist (Socialist) ruling class.

So, while in Italy, as elsewhere in interwar Europe, individual Communists, Fascists, anarchists and others fought fierce street battles with one-another in a way that is reminiscent of nothing so much as the turf wars between rival black gangs in Los Angeles today, many of the Leftist brawlers eventually went over to the Fascists --- showing how slight the real differences were between them.

Mussolini began as a disciple of Lenin and did not so much repudiate Marxism-Leninism as become a self-declared “heretic.” However fierce Mussolini grew in his antipathy to communism, as he moved into the "socialist" camp, the fascists never ceased mimicking it, implicitly underscoring their claim to be the true or superior heirs to the same legacy.

In Mussolini's exercise of power, he implemented economic policies that would endear him to many of the Left today.

No less than former Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick took the position that Communism and Fascism are the same.

A. James Gregor (Ph.D. Columbia 1961), Political Science Professor, UC Berkeley, and author of four books on Fascism/ Marxism,  asks" Why not, look upon communism as a form of fascism?

To put matters in perspective, we must define a couple of terms.

Right Wing Governments: (Monarchy, Emperor, Oligarchy)

Oligarchy: 1. government by the few  2 : a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.

Traditional Monarchy, Emperors, Czar: undivided rule or absolute sovereignty by a single person

Left Wing Governments: (Socialism, Fascism, & Communism)

Fascism: a political philosophy that exalts nation and often race above the individual, and that stands for a centralized autocratic government (a Nationalistic form of Socialism)

Socialism: governmental or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods (Can include National, Social, and Guild Socialism)

Communism: A totalitarian system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed.

At another time we will discuss whose agenda it serves to distort Fascism as a Right Wing government, rather than a Left Wing government.

Mussolini's Marxist Roots

Mussolini's father was a Revolutionary/Anarchist sharing the Communist ideals, and named his son after a trinity of radical revolutionary "heroes" Benito Juarez, Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa.Benito, in Switzerland, as a teacher in 1904, at 21 years of age, he fell in love with Angelica Balabanoff, a Ukrainian Communist agitator,  who as Mussolini's patron, introduced him to the works of Nietzsche, Hegel, Georges Sorel and Karl Marx <http://library.thinkquest.org/
17120/data/empires/communist/>, In the same year in Zurich he supposedly met Lenin (qv) <http://www.giles.34sp.com/biographies/lenin.htm>.

Angelica nursed him politically into successively higher leading positions in the party,until he became a member of the Central Committee, editor of the official organ, Avanti!, and spokesman of the internationalist leftwing, all prior to 1912!!

After that he became one of Italy's most prominent Marxist theoreticians and an intimate of Lenin. He was in fact first dubbed "Il Duce" (the Leader) when he was a member of Italy's (Marxist) Socialist Party and between 1912 and 1914 he was the editor of their newspaper, "L'Avanti".After his split with the Socialist Party he started his own Leftist newspaper "Il Popolo d'Italia" ("The People of Italy").

When he broke with the Socialist party in 1914, it was not over any dissatisfaction with socialist ideology but rather because the Socialists were neutralists in the First World War whereas Mussolini correctly foresaw that the Austro/German forces would not win the war and therefore wanted Italy to join the Allied side and thus get a slice of Austrian territory at the end of the war.

Italians had suffered many humiliations at the hands of the Austrians and there must have been very few Italians who did not share Mussolini's desire to seize historically Italian territory from them. Like many Leftists then and since Mussolini did not have any principles that he allowed to stand in the way of a grab for power.It should be noted that Mussolini's views in this matter did not at all disqualify him from continuing as a Marxist.

Like many other Marxists of his time (See Gregor, 1979), Mussolini tempered his view of the importance of class-solidarity with the recognition that both Marx and Engels had in their lifetimes lent their support to a number of wars between nations. He looked, in other words, not only at broad Marxist theory but also at how Marx and Engels applied their theories. Such"pragmatism" was, of course, a hallmark of Mussolini's thinking. And, like the Communists, Mussolini had no aversion to war.

As further commentary on Mussolini's Marxist credentials, it may be worth noting that, long before the Bolshevik revolution, Mussolini had supported the orthodox Marxist (cf. the Mensheviks) view that backward States like Italy and Russia had to go through a capitalist or bourgeois democratic stage before evolving into socialism.

It was this, as much as anything, that led Mussolini to collaborate with the Italian establishment when he eventually gained power. Mussolini's disagreement with Lenin in this matter therefore meant that Mussolini and his Fascist friends greeted with considerable glee the terrible economic disaster (with national income at one third of the 1913 level) that emerged in Russia after the Bolshevik takeover. They saw both the Bolshevik disaster and their own eventual successes as proving the correctness of Marx's theory of history.

When, in 1919, Lenin began to speak (in language that could have been Mussolini's) of the need to hold his country together with "a single iron will" (Gregor,1979, p. 124) it put him belatedly but rather clearly in Mussolini's camp.

It should also be noted that Mussolini was the son of an impoverished and very Leftist father who worked mainly as a blacksmith. Mussolini was very proud of these working-class roots and it was a great recreation of his, even after coming to power, to take drives in the country with his wife and stop at various farmhouses on the way for a chat with the family there. He would enjoy discussing the crops, the weather and all the usual rural topics and obviously just liked the feeling of being one of the people. His claim to represent the people was not just theory but heartfelt. And he never gave up his "anti-bourgeois" rhetoric.

Mussolini gaining power

After 1918, Italy was in chaos, with Communist upheavals everywhere. Mussolini initially expressed his sympathies for these upheavals but soon saw that they were reducing Italy to a form of anarchy that was helping no-one. He therefore formed his "Fasci di combattimento" --mainly comprised in the beginning of fellow ex-servicemen -- to help restore order. This they did by force, breaking up the Socialist and Communist rallies, strikes and organizations. Internecine feuds between Leftists have always been common, however.

Nonetheless, Fascism was subversive in that it fought against the traditional Italian ruling elite -- who were essentially still 19th century liberals (what would nowadays be called "neo-liberals"). It was also subversive because of its desire to innovate in many ways and to replace the existing ruling class with a new Fascist ruling class.

So, while in Italy, as elsewhere in interwar Europe, individual Communists, Fascists, anarchists and others fought fierce street battles with one-another in a way that is reminiscent of nothing so much as the turf wars between rival black gangs in Los Angeles today, many of the Leftist brawlers eventually went over to the Fascists --- showing how slight the real differences were between them.

When he did gain power, he implemented economic policies that would endear him to many of the Left today. His policies were basically protectionist. He controlled the exchange-rate of the Italian currency and promoted that old favourite of the economically illiterate --autarky -- meaning that he tried to get Italy to become wholly self-sufficient rather than rely on foreign trade. He wanted to protect Italian products from competing foreign products. The Leftistanti-globalizers of today would approve.

Mussolini y el Fascismo," in Que sais je. (in Spanish), on page 31 states:
"Mussolini likes to affirm that Marx is his spiritual father."

James Gregor in "The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism" argues Jean Kirkpatrick's position that Communism and Fascism are the same.

Further down, You will see that "Mussolini's Marxist's Roots" in conjunction with reading the "Manifesto of Fascism" by Mussolini, and "The Doctrine of Fascism" by Giovanni Gentile, make for a persuasive argument.

James Gregor, professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, below cites Mussolini saying to the Bolsheviks, We are the same, except yours is a CLASS struggle where ours is a NATIONAL struggle, but then goes on to tie them even closer by stating that, Italy was in a Class Struggle in that Italy was in the UNDERCLASS of Nations seeking equity with the IMPERIAL Powers.

Gregor has taken Jeane Kirkpatrick's point in "Dictatorships and Double Standards", that not only can communism and fascism be twinned, but they are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing."

In 1979 Gregor published 'Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Originsof Fascism'. This masterful reconstruction of Mussolini's evolution from Marxist leader of Italian socialism to avatar of fascism...Gregor had merely shown that Mussolini's fascist doctrine had evolved in a series of logical steps from his earlier Marxist convictions." Why not, he asks the reader, look upon communism as a form of fascism?

To sustain this proposition, Gregor marshals a variety of evidence and argument.... To begin with, he defines fascism as a creed possessing the following characteristics:... Apply these hallmarks to the former USSR, the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, North Korea or Cuba, and the fit is almost perfect...In another line of argument, Gregor returns to his earlier work on Mussolini, recalling that the theoretical emendation at the heart of II Duce's transition was the substitution of .......nation for class.

"Like you",said Mussolini to the Bolsheviks, "we consider necessary a centralized and unitary state which imposes iron discipline on all persons, with this difference, that you reach this conclusion by way of the concept of class, and we by way of the concept of nation."...While the distinction between class and nation as organizing principles was supposedly what rendered communism unlike fascism, Gregor says the distinction eroded within the communist world itself.

He invokes, for examples, Stalin in the waning days of WWII, and the crumbling Soviet Union in the days of Gorbachev...For the capstone to the argument about national socialism, Gregor turns his attention to communist China. Mussolini's fascist Marxism rested on the claim that Italy, undeveloped and downtrodden, was
in some sense the "proletariat" of nations. Likewise, says Gregor, the Chinese communist revolution has been much more about national redemption than class struggle,... and  now with private enterprise accounting for the bulk of the economy in communist China, "the distinctions between generic fascism and Chinese Marxism-Leninism have become increasingly threadbare."...Gregor has been motivated to expose the hypocrisy of those who insist on treating communism with scrupulous detachment but who rarely express the same delicacy toward fascism. He does so by devising a model that allows him to illustrate what the two systems have in common and how they are historically connected.

Two Sides of the Same Coin. - Review -National Interest, The Summer, 2000, by Joshua Muravchik <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751>,
<http://www.findarticles.com/p/search?tb
=art&qt=%22Joshua+Muravchik%22>

A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (Book) / Reviews (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2000), 240 pp.$30.,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/search?tb=art&qt
=The+Faces+of+Janus%3A+Marxism+and+Fascism
+in+the+Twentieth+Century+%28Book%29+%2F
+Reviews>http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/
mi_m2751/is_2000_Summer/ai_63649356

KIMBELL Quotes Muravchik Equating of MARXISM and FASCISM

Muravchik's... Heaven on Earth in large part, is given over to the rise and eventual foundering of what we might call “soft socialism.” ~M patiently details the experiments of utopians... Perhaps his most illuminating pages are devoted to the careers of Mussolini and of Engels. We tend to think of fascism as the antithesis of socialism or Marxism. But as ~M reminds us, there are in fact deep continuities between them.Mussolini began as a disciple of Lenin and did not so much repudiate Marxism-Leninism as become a self-declared “heretic.”

Thus one of Mussolini’s groups of thugs called itself the Cheka, after Lenin’s secret police. As ~M observes, “However fierce they grew in their antipathy to communism, the fascists never ceased mimicking it, implicitly underscoring their claim to be the true or superior heirs to the same legacy.” (Something similar can be said of Hitler, whose party, after all, was called National Socialism. It is true that Hitler was adamantly anti-Communist; at the same time, he acknowledged that he had “learned a great deal from Marxism.”)...

~M’s argument has two aspects. Like many other disabused commentators, he presents a sobering chronicle of socialism’s delusions and crimes. He reminds us —if we still need reminding—of the central role that the “annihilation… of reactionary races” (Marx), the “extermination” of enemies (Lenin) has always played in “really existing” Marxism.... The Death of Socialism by Roger Kimball <http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/apr02/social.htm>

MODERN LEFTISM AS RECYCLED FASCISM <http://www.geocities.com/jonjayray/musso.html>http://www.geocities.com/jonjayray/musso.html >

TO SUMMARIZE: Mussolini not only started out a Marxist, it is painfully obvious   that Fascism is just another Face of Marxism!!!!!!

End of Part I...Continued with Part II