Before and after WW 1 Italy was still owned by the few.....the royalty. It was the end of the Middle Ages. If you lived on the land you worked for the local Duke/prince etc. this precipitated the vast migration to America in the late 19th early 20th centuries. The rest went on as serfs. Slave laborers, if you will to the rulers. With few/none opportunities, Communism was a means to an end. Many including Mussolini gravitated towards it as a solution to an untenable situation
Mussolini saw communism as a dead end. Basing a new party on nationalism he built Italy up and doing so created jobs and opportunities.
Had he not tied in with Hitler and decide to grab African colonies, he might have weathered WW 2 like Franco did in Spain. A fascist country into the late 1970s.
Just saying
That points up the main difference between fascism and communism. Fascists are nationalists, Communists are internationalists. But both are socialist ideologies.