Fascism . . . was the socialism of ‘proletarian nations.’ - A. James Gregor

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.’

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.’

Fascism's most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy's most radical 'subversives' — the Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism.