Mussolini was never a staunch Marxist, by his own admission in fact - if by that you mean a supporter of the "orthodox" Marxist approach to, well anything really; but I'll try to focus on three main points: the relations of production as the true foundation of society; the organization of the party and the nature of political fight in a universal suffrage system; materialism.

 

Before that, one must explain a few things about Italian Socialism. Marxism came to Italy in the 1880s - contact existed before of course, including personal relations between Marx and Engels and various Italian "conspirators", as the two fathers of Communism would have called them, such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Filippo Buonarroti. But it is during the complex years between Gotha and Erfurt that the various Italian organizations began to look at the SPD as an inspiration for one national workers' Party, and at Marxism as both and ideological instrument of analysis and a practical concept of what their party was going to be. The result of this process would be the foundation of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892.

Unfortunately - or not, according to the points of view - Marxism did not cross the Italian border in triumph: it limped through. On one hand, the Italian society was far from the level of development that Marxism would have required as a pre-condition for the establishment of class-consciousness. That certainly constituted a concept problem for the Socialist leadership: if one accepted Marxism, then it wasn't possible for the masses to get Marxism, thus wasn't it better to resort to the much more established tradition of “republican socialism” of Mazzini and Garibaldi. The story goes that one of the first initiatives of the PSI was to give to their new members a bust of Marx – thinking to please old Engles, who entertained cordial relations with the Italians, they showed him a piece, to which he replied: “That's not Marx. That's Garibaldi!”.

Besides the anecdote, it is a fact that the tradition of Italian socialism was since the beginning arguably more Mazzini and Garibaldi than Marx and Engels. A tradition that valued ideas that were in fact irreducible to those of orthodox Marxism. Mazzini believed in a spiritual renovation where the masses participation was not the result of their material conditions but of their faith in a “religion of the Nation” and that any change in the condition of the masses was secondary to such idealistic approach.

Alas, if Marxism was at least held as a core value by the “most advanced part of the proletariat”, it would have been possible to spread bits and pieces of it among the masses. Even there though, things weren't as simple. Because, while Marxists proponents were well meaning and sometimes fairly capable in their role as party leaders, the spread of Marxism in Italy coincided with that third generation of idealism that was much more invested with hammering at Marx and restoring Hegel to his rightful place, that in was with proclaiming Marxist orthodoxy. The two leading Italian philosophers of the two generations, before and after the arrival of Marxism, Bertrando Spaventa and Benedetto Croce were in their own manner proponents of an idealism almost impossible to reconcile with Marxism. Croce's criticism of Marx was at the time especially successful, while the most advanced Italian Marxist, Antonio Labriola, was unfortunately much more successful in providing scathing portraits of his fellow socialists than in spreading Marxism.

It did not help that many of the most popular figures of Italian socialism were as “true” as a three dollar bill. Men like Enrico Ferri – whose epitaph written by F. Turati would unceremoniously remark that “of the many things Ferri had no clue, first came socialism” - were far from keepers of the sacred flame.

In this complex situation, Marxism had immediately to fend of the insidious attacks of idealistic suggestions, voluntarism, personal initiative; as well as the open criticism to its materialistic approach and its problematic take on national values.

Meanwhile the socialist leadership was trying to build a modern mass party, with individual membership and cards. Individual membership especially was a relevant point: before that, it was the worker's union that joined the party by majority vote, bringing all its members to the party. Individual membership created the party and the unions as related but distinguishable structures: the party was not a federation of the unions (that would come soon after, first the Land Workers Federation and than the General Workers Federation for factory workers) but it reserved to itself a role of political oversight of the economical battle of the unions. At the same time Italy was moving forward with suffrage expansion (universal male suffrage would be introduced in 1913), which brought to the establishment of a Socialist Parliamentary Group.

 

Now, we have our pieces in their right place: the trade unions, with leaders, members and their own conferences and deliberations; the party, with its political direction and periodic congresses; the parliamentary group, with its political line, program and relations with the government forces.

Those three things weren't the same. In fact nothing made sure that those three forces agreed with each other. Rather, once the socialists begun to gain a stable parliamentary representation, the Party leadership, direction and program (sanctioned through the Party congress which hosted delegates of the sections and trade unions) did not frequently coincide with the political orientation of the parliament group, as there was no established method to coordinate the life of the Party with the life of the Parliament. For almost the entirety of their pre-fascist experience, the parliament leader of the socialist was the reformer and founder of the Party, Filippo Turati; but during various interludes (1903-08) (1912-14) (1915-22) the Party Congress approved non-reformer programs; so that the parliamentary majority would become in turn a party minority. Expression of this internal oscillation was the turnaround at the direction of the socialist newspaper Avanti! (Bissolati 1896-1903; Ferri 1903-08; Bissolati-Morgari 1908-10; Treves 1910-12; Bacci 1912; Mussolini 1912-14; Menotti-Serrati 1914-22; Nenni 1922-48).

What were the possible lines of division?

First the reformers: by late XIX century, the progress of participation of the masses to the political life through expansion of suffrage had brought forward the idea that the socialization of society could proceed without a revolutionary break or even that the improvement of the conditions of the workers could be the end goal in itself. This “reformer” tendency, that is usually linked to its original proponent, Eduard Bernstein found its supporters in Italy as well – Ivanoe Bonomi the most reformer of them all, who argued for direct participation of the socialist to the government. On the opposite was the non-reformer position, later known as maximalist, that refused any collaboration with the political establishment, to the point of denouncing any participation to parliamentary life (this current fell under the leadership of very different personalities such as the aforementioned Ferri, Mussolini and Menotti-Serrati). Neither of the two was strictly speaking Marxist, even if it is far more obvious for the first current.

The Marxist orthodox were the so called “intransigent” group; themselves breaking up into currents under men such as Oddino Morgari and Costantino Lazzari (Turati fell on the moderate side of the intransigents or on the left side of the reformers if you will). Those advocated a rigid application of Marxism as the golden rule of their political action, opposing any form of revisionism and any suggestion of personal initiative, but accepted that – while the Party promoted the growth of a class consciousness among the workers – its political action had to be focused on the chances of immediate improvement of their living conditions, thus cooperating with and overseeing the unions in their social and economical revendications.

This was soon (after the end of the bizarre leadership of Ferri) to become the battle ground for the socialist forces. The reformer/revisionist groups, soon counting among them not only Bonomi (the “the socialist who takes pot luck” according to Labriola) but also one of the founding fathers of Italian Socialism, Leonida Bissolati, argued that the second moment of the socialist political action was in fact the only one that mattered and that the ultimate goal of socialism was nothing else than a socialist government, going as far as to join the talks with the King after the crisis of the Luzzatti Government in 1911. If the Parliamentary Group under Turati might have entertained hopes of avoiding a break up, the Party was shifting towards a much more extreme position. The Reggio Emilia Congress of 1912 sanctioned the expulsion of the reformers (that would result in the creation of the Italian Socialist Reformer Party) Bissolati, Bonomi, Podrecca and Cabrini, approving with large majority an Order of Business by newcomer Benito Mussolini, in what would remain the highest point of his socialists political career.