We are left with a budget of paradoxes. Given the seeming logic of the proposed classification of right-wing polities—with nationalism, hierarchical … - A. James Gregor

By the 1990s, it was no longer possible to speak, with any intellectual integrity, of a Soviet Union of Stalin as having been informed by a ‘proletarian’ economic system, or possessed of a ‘working-class’ government. No more credence is invested in the Stalinist, Maoist, or Castro ‘proletarian state’ than was invested in the ‘proletarian’ character of the ‘German National Socialist Workers’ Party’ or the ‘Fascist State of Labor.’

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.

The Stalinism that followed the totalitarian intimations of Lenin's Russia, was not only totalitarian, it was infused by an ‘almost fascist-like chauvinism,’ together with a ‘bureaucratization, absence of democracy, censorship, police repression,’ and, as has been suggested, by an irrepressible and increasingly intrusive anti-Semitism. By the mid-1990s, it was increasingly acknowledged that left-wing totalitarianism more and more began to resemble right-wing totalitarianism.