The moment one speaks of returning to the concept of a revolutionary communist party, and motivates this return with a reclamation of past categories of struggle (i.e. the vanguard, proletariat-bourgeoisie, revisionism and anti-revisionism, revolutionary science), every defense mechanism conditioned by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the supposed triumph of world capitalism is mobilized to inoculate the reader from ideological contamination.

The end of Trump represents a turning point for populism and populists. A bit like what happened to communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

How would I differ from the Communists...if I were to imitate the so-called fascists . . . of Italy?

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.

By 1938, Mussolini could confidently assert that ‘in the face of the total collapse of the system [bequeathed] by Lenin, Stalin has covertly transformed himself into a Fascist.’

Given the opportunity, Mussolini would have been glad as late as 1920-21 to take under his wing the Italian Communists, for whom he felt great affinities: greater, certainly, than for democratic socialists, liberals and conservatives. Genetically, Fascism issued from the 'Bolshevik' wing of Italian socialism, not from any conservative ideology or movement.