Same Genus, Wrong Weather

Gregor's argument, stripped of its footnotes, is a provocation dressed as a filing system: fascism and Bolshevism are not opposites reconciled only by their victims' body counts, but "species of the same genus," both grown from a transmogrified Marxism forced to solve a problem Marx never anticipated — revolution in economies too backward to have earned it. Lenin inherits a doctrine built for advanced industrial capitalism and applies it to Russian peasants; Corridoni and the Italian syndicalists reach the same fork a decade earlier and call it something else. The book's real target isn't Hitler or Stalin, it's the postwar settlement that let communism keep its Enlightenment credentials while fascism absorbed all the moral toxicity — a settlement Gregor calls, not unfairly, an "intellectual strategy" rather than a finding. Seventeen years on, the argument that "traditional Marxism is simply a failed theory, largely irrelevant to the modern world" reads like a man trying to acquit an idea by convicting everyone who ever implemented it.

The engine underneath all of this is what Gregor calls backwardness — industrial backwardness, paired with "an associated feeling of in