During the 1920s and 1930s European Marxists, especially those who followed the leadership of Moscow, produced a succession of analyses of fascism, all of which argued that fascism was in origin the creation of powerful capitalist interests and that when in power it was essentially their tool. Italian capitalism, they insisted, was by the early 1920s incapable of further expansion and therefore created fascism in order to repress the working class and impose a static, protected economy on Italy.

It is certainly true that a close relationship existed between the fascist regime and both industrial and agricultural capitalists, and indeed that the regime would probably not have been born without their assistance.

The interwar orthodox Marxist account was nevertheless misleading in several respects – as perceptive Italian communists such as Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti recognized. First, it ignored the importance of fascism’s mass following and its emergence independently of capitalist interests; second, it failed adequately to explain why in this particular context such interests preferred an alliance with fascism to continued acceptance of a liberalism itself highly favourable to capitalism; third, it exaggerated the importance of such interests in the formulation of policy within the fascist state; and fourth, its depiction of a static or contracting economy under fascism was simply inaccurate.