The Girondin bloc also ratified laws ensuring equality in taxation, freedom of worship, and legal equality of punishment, and abolishing serfdom outr… - L.K. Samuels

Most historians agree that historical Italian Fascism was a mixed bag of rightwing and left-wing socioeconomic policies. Nevertheless, recent evidence has shed new light on the underpinnings of Italian Fascism, discovering that this totalitarian state had embodied a far more collectivistic, socialist, and progressive ideology, placing it squarely on the left side of the political dichotomy, that is, only if Marxism is also considered to be on the Left.

In the case of libertarianism, because it opposes fraud and the initiation of force, when pursuing its hereditary linkage to original liberalism it should be classified as standing on the left side of the political divide. Some might respond that legions of capitalists have taken leading roles in authoritarian productions. True, but these so-called capitalists mostly hobnob with politicians and statists, promote rent-seeking, endogenous policies to obtain state-sanctioned monopolies. As the cronies of statists, they are barely a cut above socialism, and have little interest in letting capital and goods move freely and unrestricted between buyer and seller, for whom, in turn, they have little sympathy. They are fastened to government coffers and machinations, and they downplay the value of the dynamics of competition.

Mussolini found much of John Maynard Keynes’s economic theories consistent with fascism.