"After his defeat in the 1919 election, Mussolini saw no future in trying to out-socialist the socialists. Without a distinct policy, without friends and backing, he was in serious danger of ending up as a confused and egocentric demagogue with a talent for histrionics."

“brought a radical Marxist strand to the Avanti! newspaper, soon doubling its circulation. With a growing audience, Mussolini redoubled the urgency of his utopian propaganda; ‘private property is theft’ and should be abolished as Italy moved through the phase of collectivism forwards to the ultimate goal of communism.”

“desire for revenge against the bourgeoisie was genuine enough; his intention was to inject the germs of social revolution into Italian society in order to ensure that, if Italy should lose the war, whoever won would have a difficult time of it. In this way, fascism, which had once invented the myth of having saved Italy from bolshevism, ended up deliberately doing the exact opposite.”

“Mussolini had once belonged to the Bolshevik wing of the Italian Socialist party and still in 1924 confessed admiration for Lenin, while Trotsky was quoted as saying that Mussolini was his best pupil.”

“forcibly denounced those socialists who thought religion a matter for individual conscience or had their children baptized. Science had proved that God did not exist and the Jesus of history was an ignorant Jew whose family thought him mad, and who was a pigmy compared to the Buddha. Religion, he said, was a disease of the psyche, an epidemic to be cured by psychiatrists, and Christianity in particular was vitiated by preaching the senseless virtues of resignation and cowardice, whereas the new socialist morality should celebrate violence and rebellion.”

“The election indicated that the prevailing sentiment in the country was to the left and Mussolini acknowledge this face by still in 1920 calling himself a socialist, albeit a dissident. He continued to campaign for nationalization of land, workers’ participation in the running of factories and partial expropriation of capital,…”

“The Mussolini of 1944 reasserted the socialist beliefs of his youth because he now felt that he had been cheated by the world of finance and industry: after having gained immensely from fascism,… To maintain some intellectual coherence he tried to pretend that, notwithstanding appearances, he had never deserted the socialist programme he had put forward for fascism in 1919; he had allowed certain tactical deviations in the interim, but for the most part, his basic views had never changed. In anonymous articles he now confirmed that he had been right when, in 1910, he called on the proletariat to capture power from the capitalists by a bloody revolution. . . He now decreed that all industrial firms employing more than 100 workers would be nationalized.”