The theory of totalitarianism certainly provided a way out in offering a distinction between ‘democratic’ anticommunism and ‘totalitarian’ anticommun… - Ernst Nolte

It is not Sorel but Marx whom [Mussolini] calls ‘the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence.’ It cannot be denied that Mussolini soon acquired the reputation of a barricadero and a Blanquist. His reputation was due less to certain theoretical convictions than to his temperament, when he conducted an anticlerical campaign of unparalleled fury in the Trentino , or when he pursued social warfare between farm laborers, sharecroppers, and property owners to the point of bloody excesses in the Romagna, or when he was the only prominent Marxist to defend the wild popular uprising of the Settimana Rossa (Red Week) in 1914. Wherever it was a matter of taking a theoretical stand he remained well on the Marxist track.

Otto Strasser’s socialism was much more durable and much more carefully thought out. No doubt Marx would have called him a petit-bourgeois socialist. In his best-known publication on his program he spoke of a Reich corporative chamber and the guilds, of hereditary fiefs and the reagrarianization of Germany. Strasser called for autarky and domestic currency, the war of revolution against Versailles, and a military aristocracy. But there was more than mere demagogy in his demands for splitting up of large estates, for profit participation, for a people’s state of Germanic democracy. On the whole it was a genuinely socialist program, at least to the extent to which it was imbued with the emotional appeal of the expansion and attainment of freedom.

Marx succumbed to error in believing that the number of the industrial proletariat would constantly rise and reach a huge majority; in fact the process of industrialization, from a certain point in time, allowed the new group of ‘stiff collar proletarians’ to increase more, and the process led them, in spite of all their anti-capitalist resentments, to an alliance with the old middle strata and the grand bourgeoisie. Thus it came to the paradox ‘that national fascism is on the one hand a political consequence of this development predicted by Marx, and on the other hand a movement which has as its most effective slogan ‘Down with Marxism’.