Chapter 12- Conclusions 

The 1930’s saw the full emergence of one-party state systems run by charismatic leaders ruling over populations called to redemptive purposes. Both Lenin’s communism and Mussolini’s fascism were the intellectual children of Marx and Engel.  

The problems turned on the relationship between the economic base of society and the corresponding ideological superstructure. This mechanistic view denied freedom and rendered moral responsibility meaningless.  

Lenin and Mussolini both addressed these concerns, took different paths, and yet still arrived at very similar outcomes. Lenin insisted his Marxism was the Marxism of its founders. Mussolini acknowledged there was room for different interpretations. 

Mussolini and the Italians could not reduce the moral and ethical struggles to simple class struggle. While socialists had been anti-state, considering it a tool of the bourgeois, they were forced in time to deal with how revolutionary governments would administer their duties before the people. They were also forced to deal with the undeniable nationalist sentiments in their respective working classes. 

Giovanni Gentile took Marx seriously and argued that he could not have been a true materialist, because materialism committed one to individualism, which Marx was clearly against. Gentile understood this to mean that individuals could only be conceived in relationship with society.  

Sergio Panunzio saw the state as lawgiver and law keeper, as well as being responsible to administer, foster, and oversee production. The state should promote culture, development, and generally oversee the well-being of the people. He also spoke of specific times when special individuals would express the will of revolutionary people. It was this seamless identification of citizens with the state, and its leadership, that was central to the concept of totalitarianism.  

Lenin inherited nothing in classical Marxism that would apply to Russia, an economic backwater. He had never seriously treated moral and ethical questions. His morals were driven purely by his political goals. “Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and unite working people around the proletariat.” Ethics and morality were dictated by class struggle. The end was communism, and the means, violent revolution. Lenin used the law and the party to motivate workers to revolution, and in his view, the party spoke for the proletariat, whether the proletariat agreed or not. It was expected, per Marxism, that eventually the state would wither away as unneeded in the communist utopia. But Stalin said that the state, in its totalitarian form, was essential during the transition from capitalism to communism. Anyone who had hinted otherwise had, by the time of Stalin’s Great Terror, been eliminated. Stalin rejected Marx’s materialist claims that law was a simple reflection of modes of production, and insisted that it was the party and its leaders who were the paramount driver of this historic development. Stalin explicitly saw the state as the formulator of the law, not the law as the reflection of economics. 

Lenin too understood that the state would need to allocate resources, distribute goods, and govern with discipline and law, and that law would need an instrument capable of enforcing it. He understood the state as being a control apparatus, always wielded by one class to suppress another.