World War I would have a profound effect on socialism. The looming war brought out challenges to orthodox Marxism among the workers and socialists of each nation. This is a summary of Chapters 9, 10, and 11. 

Chapter 9- The Great War and the Response of Revolutionary Marxists 
In the years leading up to WWI, doctrinal Marxism underwent radical development. One huge test was the brotherhood of workers. Socialists were opposed to wars on the grounds that workers internationally should find solidarity with each other, and against the capitalist governments. With Europe on the doorstep of a major conflict that would draw many of the nations against each other, It would act as a major test for the solidarity of proletariat populations of each nation, Marx’s assertions about class solidarity, and for socialists themselves. Would they betray their countries? Or their Marxist doctrines? They found mixed direction in Marx and Engels, who had written inconsistently on wars, supporting some, and denying legitimacy to others.  

Lenin maintained an orthodox Marxist position on war; that Russian workers should oppose Russian engagement in the war, and further, actually rise up in socialist revolution against the Russian state.  

In Italy, the initial socialist response was absolute neutrality in the face of war. Mussolini’s initial stance on war was that it was exclusively a consequence of capitalism. But the realities facing Europe before WWI could not be reduced to simple bourgeois interests. Mussolini began to break with Marx by stating that while Marx was correct, for his time, he captured a ‘reality in motion’ which was never meant to be a truth for all times.  

Facing WWI, Italy was not in love with Germany, even if allied through treaties. Mussolini knew that if Germany attacked, Italians would defend their homeland. Mussolini also understood that if Italian workers maintained absolute neutrality in the face of German aggression, the peninsula would be overrun and Italian workers would suffer as much as Italian capitalists. He saw a more nuanced picture than Lenin. Mussolini thought that if socialism were to survive as a meaningful political movement, it would have to settle its account with nationalism. 

Chapter 10- The Great War, Revolution, and Leninism 
Lenin was dead-set against nationalism. But he did recognize Russian national pride. He made a distinction between that and nationalism, which he claimed was bourgeois in origin. 

Marx’s theory had capitalism increasing until it spread to every country. Only when a nations productive capabilities had been fully realized, and there was a trained and educated populace that had been displaced by the increasing concentration of capital in a few hands, could class consciousness arise in the proletariat, and there be a reasonable expectation of proletarian rule. Marx and Engels were conflicting on what form a dictatorship of the proletariat would assume, but Kautsky argued that it would have to be parliamentary and representative democracy. 

Lenin argued instead that the new government was pro-proletariat, and actively oppressive of everyone else. The state was understood to be a machine for the suppression of one class by another. Lenin simply wanted to flip the oppression against the proletariat, to oppression against everyone else. The problem of course was determining who was proletarian and who was not. Lenin was clear. Those committed to Bolshevism were proletarian, all else were note, and therefore to be suppressed. The dictatorship of the proletariat was, in effect, a dictatorship of a small number of self-selected, elite party members over all the rest.  

As the Bolshevik’s took power, Nikolai Bukharin made it clear that the power of the state would not only be used against dominant class enemies, it would be used against the workers themselves, since many of the working class did not yet have class consciousness.  

Things went from bad to worse and by 1921, the Russian economy had been so devastated that Lenin was forced to admit that some form of state capitalism had to be instituted in order to bring production up to the levels needed to see socialism flourish.  

Chapter 11- The Great War, Revolution, and Fascism 
In Italy, the interventionist (here meaning intervention in the war, rather than neutrality) socialists were considered heterodox by the socialist world. Many of these interventionist socialists felt let down by the Allies’ failed promises to Italy. They felt Italy had been treated like a backward state and brushed off, so they forged a new path under Mussolini that sought to utilize the veterans returning from the war, the working class, and even the capitalists, in order to form a movement on two realities: the nation and the productive base that sustained it.  

Mussolini called this national syndicalism and it was meant to unite the nation around the myth of ‘the nation’. While Marx had made class the only relevant group of history, Mussolini argued that nation might serve as the class of all classes. He thought of his system as a practical socialism that transcended class struggle in the interest of national economic development for the benefit of all. 

Representative democracy was not Mussolini’s system. Like other Marxists, he thought democracies served the bourgeois, not the workers. He argued for a council of representatives from various industries and sectors that would improve Italy’s economic strength. Mussolini, like other Marxists, initially distrusted the state as bourgeois, but understood it as necessary to get Italy to the strength required for socialism’s goals. 

Giovanni Gentile was a philosopher who had an influence on Mussolini. He believed that individuals only found the being socially, and therefore the individual was only recognizable as part of the collective. The state was the only unified reality of its individual components. 

Fascism imagined the common will of a historic people who will realize the fundamental unity the identifies individual with his community. It rejected the common notion of elective democracy because it failed to understand the communitarian nature of human beings.  

Fascists didn’t think of the state as representing a dictatorship of the proletariat. The state represented all the constituents of the nation.