A. James Gregor Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

The first Fascists were almost all Marxists—serious theorists who had long been identified with Italy's intelligentsia of the Left.

A. James Gregor
Fascism... was the socialism of 'proletarian nations.'

A. James Gregor
That Mussolini chose Gentile to author the philosophical portion of Fascism's official doctrine provides evidence of the confidence Fascists entertained with respect to Gentile's thought.

A. James Gregor
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.

A. James Gregor
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.

A. James Gregor
Fascist social welfare legislation compared favorably with the more advanced European nations and in some respect was more progressive.

A. James Gregor
Fascism never served the interests of Italian business... there is no credible evidence that Fascism controlled the nation's economy for the benefit of the 'possessing classes.'

A. James Gregor
Between 1862 and 1922, the Italian government had disbursed sixty million lire for school construction; between 1922 and 1942, the Fascist government devoted 400 million lire of public monies to the enterprise. The total expenditure on education rose from 922.4 million lire in the financial year 1922-23 to 1,636 million lire for 1936-37. In 1930 there were 110,200 public elementary schools while the number, by 1935, had risen to 126,934.

A. James Gregor
When Marinetti founded Futurism in 1909, he called for 'incendiary violence' that might drive Italy and Italians out of the 'fetid somnolence' of dolce far niente. He incited Futurists and their allies to the destruction of museums, monuments, and universities—to decimate everything that 'stank of the past'… All of this was suffused with aggression and violence, with an appeal to slaps and blows, to culminate in an invocation to what he called the 'beauty of battle,' and the 'hygiene of war.'

A. James Gregor
Neither Stalinism nor Fascist totalitarianism would have been possible without the transmogrified Marxism, that infilled both.

A. James Gregor
[Italian] Fascism was a variant of classical Marxism, a believe system that pressed some themes argued by both Marx and Engels until they found expression in the form of 'national syndicalism' that was to animate the first Fascism.

A. James Gregor
It can be said, in a qualified sense, that Gentile entertained considerable sympathy for the neo-Hegelian Marxist intellectual tradition.

A. James Gregor
Thus, by 1925, both Leninism and Fascism, variants of Marxism, had created political and economic systems that shared singular properties… Both sought order and disciple of entire populations in the service of an exclusivistic party and an ideology that found its origins in classical Marxism… Both created a kind of 'state capitalism,' informed by a unitary party, and responsible to a 'charismatics' leader.

A. James Gregor
All totalitarianism of the twentieth century were predicated on a systematic, anti-individualistic collectivism. In the case of Marxist-Leninism, the source was classical Marxism. [Giovanni] Gentile had carefully dissected the neo-Hegelian roots of that collectivism. What he found missing in the collectivism of Marx was ethical concern. He sought to provide that concern to the collectivism of Fascism—a collectivism that shared a common intellectual origin with Marxism and Marxism-Leninism.

A. James Gregor
Whether their ideological commitment was to proletarian communism, or the Nordic race, or the restoration of Italy to its proper place in the community of nations, they all chose the hierarchically structured, charismatically led single party state to pursue their ends—a state first fixed in the political doctrine by Fascism.

A. James Gregor
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.

A. James Gregor
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.

A. James Gregor
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.

A. James Gregor
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.'

A. James Gregor
Fascism's most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy's most radical 'subversives' — the Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism.

A. James Gregor
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.

A. James Gregor
By the end of the 1960's, Soviet theoreticians were prepared to argue that the 'Chinese leadership' had transformed itself into an 'anti-Marxist, anti-socialist, chauvinistic and anti-Soviet... bourgeois-nationalistic' movement of reaction... In their account, Soviet thinkers had recourse to the same list of descriptive traits that Western academics had employed for some considerable time to identify fascist political and social systems.

A. James Gregor