As the post WW 1 history shows, communist revolutions did not materialize in any of the industrialized countries - not even close. Worse yet, they contributed to internal divisions within the working class. The only success that socialist and working class parties ever achieved was through electoral politics. A belief that a revolution was imminent after WW2 strikes me as pure fantasy.
Wojtek
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Leaving aside WWI...
What I noticed was something different than mere faith. The communists and socialist parties of the 1930s went underground and carried their organizations with them. They were the most active and marginally successful. In the very brief few months with the collapse of the German military control of the civilian apparatus, these same underground parties emerged and began to replace the failed and destroyed social infrastuctures. The power gap provided a very brief and fluid few months for maybe not a revolution, but a much more thorough liberation.
When the US and British armies arrived they had to kick these nascent groups out of emerging power and find ways to marginalize their influence in postwar reconstrutions.
It just happens I am re-reading the last chapters of Basil Davidson's Special Operations Europe. These closing sections cover the liberation of Genoa, which the surrounding undergrounds took from the collapsed German army, and captured several thousand German troops. Their command provisionally signed over the city to the communist/socialist leaders. Davidson tried to wire shortwave these events to the US army command some thirty or more kilometers south and got no response. So the partisans selected him as translator and then sent them to go meet. The US army arrived a day or so later and announced they had liberated Genoa. The partisan provisional government had their German POWs marched passed the meeting hall where the allied commanders were trying to pretend they liberated Genoa.
About a week or so later some British colonel and his group arrived to appoint suitable officials for mayor, police chief, and so forth, but couldn't get the installed partisans out of these positions for the moment. Davidson is recalled at this point. I haven't finished.
But the general theme you are left with was that allies re-established the old order and its functionaries over the resistence and struggle of the majority of partisans at least in northern Italy. They were rebuffed in Yugoslavia and actively fought armed resistance in Greece---where Davidson had been posted during the earlier part of the war. He was constantly frustrated by the very low level of support and meager occasional air drops.
Well, argue if you want. But read Heartfield's history and Davidson's account and argue with them. Davidson is gone, but Heartfield is around to defend it to nth footnote. I can see it. It's the kind of thing that makes sense and I believe them. I had gotten some glimmer of these allied shenanigans, including the ambiguous reception of de Gaulle from occasional notes in Gide, Malraux, Camus, and Sartre. De Gaulle sold France nationalism and the intelligentsia were not all that keen about it, because it meant a return to militant colonialism and a total lack of a progressive future.
Shane Mage sums it up pretty much as Heartfield without the long catalog of events, statements, papers, policy rigmarole and attending footnotes. In other words as a polemic rather than a history.
Drag off the oiled tarp of nazis rule and the damned communists start sprouting like weeds. A milder form even started up in the Britain and the US once the overt war was over. Stone and Kuznick cover the suppression of more tolerant views toward Russia and socialism or at least socially enlightened democratic rule.
The drive for a better life from the 1930s had been put on hold for the war, and now the war was over. The old boy power elite (C.Wright Mills) were having none of that. Back to work and keep your mouth shut cause we got commie rats everywhere...
CG