40 quotes
In a nonspecific sense, one might say that almost all the other antiliberal, reactive nationalist and developmental revolutions in our century were deviant forms of paradigmatic Fascism—the more deviant, the more destructive.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
Fascism, National Socialism, Stalinism and Maoism were all species of a single genus, ‘totalitarianism.’
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
What should be recognized at this point is the fact that Mussolini, whatever else he was, was a collectivist, who conceived human beings as social animals. He had learned that man was a communal being from Marx.
Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (2001)
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.
The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (1969)
Should one choose to seek out today’s fascism, one is counseled to look to the retrograde former Soviet Union, and the reformist People’s Republic of China. They are the natural hosts of a ‘resurgence’ of fascism.
Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (2001)
What some of the revolutionary syndicalists proceed to do was to identify the ‘communality’ of man not will class, but with the nation. The first intimations of a ‘revolutionary nationalism’ made their appearance among the most radical Marxists.
Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (2001)
Mussolini was a Marxist ‘heretic'.
Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (1979)
Whatever one thinks of his Marxism today, Mussolini was accepted by his socialist peers as a Marxist theoretician. He rose to leadership in the Italian Socialist Party at least in part on the basis of his recognized capacity as a socialist intellectual.
The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (1969)
Stalin, in turn, transformed Marxism into a rationale for national socialism… Leon Trotsky was equally quick to condemn the advocacy of socialism in one country, a commitment which further eroded classical Marxism.
The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (1969)
As late as 1947, Mao insisted that his program corresponded to that of Sun. Until December of that year, Mao insisted that his ‘new democracy’ would protect the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘their industry and commerce.’ Because of China’s backwardness, he would continue to support capitalist development and ensure that both public and private, capital and labor, interests would benefit from the revolution.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
There were even Italian Marxist-Leninists--including Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of his nation's Communist Party--who conceived of Fascism as the only viable form of Marxism for economically retrograde communities.
By the time Spirito delivered his communications at the Convention of 1932, these sentiments had united with neo-idealist totalitarian aspirations. The result was variously identified as ‘Fascist communism,’ Fascist Bolshevism’ or ‘Fascist socialism.’
The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (1969)
By the time of its disappearance at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, it was no longer plausible to argue that the Soviet Union offered a clear alternative to the ‘right-wing extremism’ of fascism. In fact, it was no longer clear what ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ might be taken to mean in terms of the major revolutions of the twentieth century.
Gentile maintained, with Marx, that the ‘essence’ of man is not individual—but social. The human person is a function of a complex pattern of interactions with both nature and other persons in a law-and-rule-government environment. The human being is essentially a social creature (a Gemeinwesen)—and outside society, loses humanity.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
In any event, by 1930 it was evident that Fascism, for its own purposes, would have to evolve institutions and techniques to restrict the independent power of the possessing classes. This was to be effected not only to render the state truly sovereign, but also to defend those socialist values that Fascist syndicalists and neo-idealists had never abjured.
The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (1969)
Mussolini himself, before he knew who would collect around the standards of the new Fascist Republican Party, committed himself to the realization of the original syndicalist and neo-idealist program of Fascism. His original intention was to call his new republic the Italian Socialist Republic—which nonetheless advertised itself as the vehicle of an Italian socialism, a national socialism.
The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (1969)
It was Stalin, Lenin’s unnatural heir, who ‘in the early 1930s… injected the adrenalin of Russian nationalism into the Soviet political bloodstream’ in an effort to restore some vitality to what gave every appearance of a failed revolution.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
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.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
Gentile’s rationale was neo-Hegelian in origin, the same source out of which Marxism and Marxism-Leninism were to emerge. In fact, Gentile understood Marxism so well that his essay on the thought of the young Marx has not only withstood the test of time, but was, on the occasion of its publication, recommended as particularly insightful by V.I. Lenin.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
By the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Marxist theoreticians had begun to evaluate fascism in a totally unanticipated fashion . . . More than that, as Marxist theorists were compelled to reinterpret fascism in the light of empirical evidence and political circumstances, the fundamental affinities shared by Marxist and fascist regimes became apparent.