All totalitarianism of the twentieth century were predicated on a systematic, anti-individualistic collectivism. In the case of Marxist-Leninism, the… - A. James Gregor

Mussolini insisted that Fascism was the only form of ‘socialism’ appropriate to the ‘proletarian nations’ of the twentieth century.

The individual was the state, and the state was Italy, and Italy was Fascism, and Mussolini was all of them. Such a series of substitutions constitutes the sustaining logic of charismatic totalitarian socialism.

As early as 1934, Fascists had argued that ‘in the course of its development, the Russian revolution has gradually given evidence of fully abandoning Marxist postulates and of a gradual, if surreptitious, acceptance of certain fundamental political principles identified with Fascism.’ Just as the National Syndicalists had suggested, Bolshevism could be viable only if it abandoned the substance of the Marxism it pretended was its inspiration. More than that, toward the end of the 1930s, serious Fascist theorists sought to emphasize the fact that Bolshevism, as a form of Marxism, had entirely misconstrued the challenges of the contemporary world. Soviet doctrinal literature continued to feature internationalist, democratic, anti-statist, and socialist themes—at a time when Stalinism was becoming increasingly more nationalist, authoritarian, and statist, and manifestly less socialist.