World revolution

A new upsurge of revolutionary feeling swept across Europe in the aftermath of World War II, though it was not as strong as the one triggered by World War I which resulted in a failed socialist revolution in Germany and a successful one in Russia. Communist parties in countries such as Greece, France, and Italy had acquired significant prestige and public support due to their leadership of anti-fascist resistance movements during the war; as such, they also enjoyed considerable success at the polls and regularly finished second in elections in the late 1940s. However, none managed to finish in first and form a government. For Communist parties in Eastern Europe, meanwhile, though they did win elections at around the same time, Western media criticized the lack of liberal democratic elements in their rise to power. Nonetheless, Communist movements in Eastern Europe proliferated, even with some local cases independent of the USSR, such as the Yugoslav Partisans led by the future leader of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito, who had led the struggle against fascism and Axis occupation during World War II.

Student and worker revolts across the world in the 1960s and early 1970s, coupled with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the establishment of the New Left together with the Civil Rights Movement, the militancy of the Black Panther Party and similar armed/insurrectionary "Liberation Front" groups, and even a bit of a resurgence in the labor movement for a time once again made it seem to some as though world revolution was not only possible, but imminent; thus, there arose a common expression, "The East is Red, and the West is Ready". However, this radical left spirit ebbed by the mid-1970s, and in 1980s and 1990s there was a return to certain right-wing, economically conservative ideologies (spearheaded, among other examples, by Thatcherism in the United Kingdom and Reaganomics in the United States) and also free-market reforms in China and in Vietnam.

The seeming triumph of Neoliberalism as the sole world-ideology led some liberal and conservative writers, such as Francis Fukuyama to write, as in his work 'The End of History and the Last Man', that although Marxist and Hegelian theory was correct in that dialectical materialism had led to an ideal society, this society was in fact late-twentieth century liberalism, and that there would be no further political change beyond the confines of capitalism and liberalism for the foreseeable future.[4] Indeed, according to Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton this acknowledgement of the fundamental reliability (though tweaked) of Marxist theory, yet the denial of its global applicability in the face of ascendant Reaganite and Thatcherite dogma, led to a contradiction at the heart of society in the 1980s and 1990s:

″One might have thought that if Marxism was true in 1975, as many then claimed it was, then — short of some immense sea-change in the world itself — it would also have been true in 1985. But in 1985 it was mattering less whether it was true or not, just as the existence of God was a burning issue in 1860 but hardly so a century later. Marxism was now less a disconcerting challenge than the irritating or endearing idiosyncrasy of those unable to relinquish an imaginary selfhood inherited from the past. It belonged irrevocably to the great epoch of modernity, within which, whether true or false, it figured as an entirely intelligible project. Once that age had passed into a different problematic, Marxism could be seen as at best a set of valid responses to a set of questions which were no longer on the agenda. It thus crossed over, in the eyes of some, from being false but relevant, to true but superfluous."[5]

Within Marxist theory, Lenin's concept of the labor aristocracy and his description of imperialism, and – separately, but not necessarily unrelatedly – Trotsky's theories regarding the deformed workers' state, offer several explanations as to why the world revolution has not occurred to the present day. Many groups still explicitly pursue the goal of worldwide communist revolution, calling it the truest expression of proletarian internationalism.