Bereft of much of its mummery, Marxist theory reveals itself as a variant of generic fascism. The contest of the twentieth century, which has cost so… - A. James Gregor

Fascism, National Socialism, Stalinism and Maoism were all species of a single genus, ‘totalitarianism.’ The resemblances they shared were cognitively more significant than the features that distinguished them. More significantly, perhaps, the features that originally distinguished one totalitarianism from another gradually abated over time. By the end of the century, Marxist-Leninist systems had begun to take on some of the major species-traits of Mussolini’s Fascism. All of this attests to the futility of attempting to identify Fascism, or fascism, with the political right. Fascism was neither essentially right-wing nor intrinsically ‘anticommunist.' Fascism was neither ‘anti-intellectual’ nor, in principle ‘irrationalist.’

What distinguished Gentile’s Fascist rationale from that which came to characterize the legitimating rationale of Marxist-Leninism was Gentile’s identification of the nation—rather than the ‘proletariat’—as the community of destiny that would shape our time. For Gentile, proletarians represented only component elements of a larger organic community: the nation. In the modern world, only the nation could provide the material, intellectual, political, and moral environment in which the individual might find fulfillment.

We are left with a budget of paradoxes. Given the seeming logic of the proposed classification of right-wing polities—with nationalism, hierarchical political structures, and charismatic leadership as defining properties— both fascism and Marxism-Leninism would seem to be political products of right-wing extremism. Should that be the case, the revolutions undertaken by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong were all right-wing endeavors.