In the mid-1920s the story breaks off and up into separate pieces and chapters. Stalinism as a world phenomenon, the onset of fascism, World War II, and the Cold War more than sufficed to repress or frighten into silence unorthodox Marxists. Yet a Western Marxism did not evaporate; its paths can be followed through these decades until the late 1950s, when it reemerged, again political and public.

The scattering and decentralization of Western Marxism lends an arbitrariness to the examination of particular individuals or groups. In Italy, France, Germany, and elsewhere, groups and grouplets, traditions, and currents persisted that finally coalesced into a viable – if unsuccessful – alternative to Soviet and orthodox Marxism.

The fate of Western Marxism in Italy requires some additional comments. In surveying the development of Western Marxism, simple patterns are seductive. If these fail, the opposite approach is equally tempting: to find only “special cases” and to arrive at no general conclusions. In many respects, Italy was a special case, at least in regard to the roots and impact of Western Marxism. Nowhere else did the Western Marxists – the Frankfurt School, or Pannekoek and Gorter, or Merleau-Ponty and Sartre – participate in the mainstream of Marxism. Yet Italian Marxism incorporated Antonio Gramsci. The resiliency and independence of Italian communism in the current period is partly due to this fact (or accident?).

The process by which Gramsci became anointed and official has provoked endless controversy. To some it entailed the domestication of Gramsci, a falsification of his thought; the opponent of official Marxism is palmed off as the exponent.