Mussolini himself undoubtedly wished to be regarded as a Marxist. Whenever possible he extols the memory of the ‘father and teacher’ who alone repres… - Ernst Nolte

Mussolini laid the foundations not only for Italian postwar communism (he boasted of this paternity as late as his first chamber speech as a Fascist deputy in 1921), but also for the impotence of the embryonic Social Democracy led by Turati, and this impotence was perhaps the most immediate cause of the fascist victory.

The most personal and intense instance of Mussolini’s coming to grips with Marxism is his confrontation with Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution. During his stay in Switzerland, Mussolini had had contact, if not with Lenin himself, with men around him; he had read some of Lenin’s writings; Angelica Balabanov, Mussolini’s former tutor, was now with Lenin in Russia… But it is typical of Mussolini’s prevailing interests of the moment that, like his dialogue with Marxism, even the duel with Lenin appears at first as merely one further aspect of the struggle against Germany.

National Socialism could not be deduced exclusively from a reaction to the Bolshevik movement, that on the contrary there existed, even before the war, a brutal German nationalism, and that explicit intentions of extermination of the Jews were even expressed in the program of one party.