A post-1949 socialist bloc expansion seemed to make the socialist dynamic globally ascendant.

Evidence

Revolution in 1949- even more than the Red Army’s advances into the backward zones of East-Central Europe in the course of World War II - promised the emergence of a bloc of socialist countries, the French defeat in Indochina in 1954, the intensification of the Cuban Revolution from 1959 onwards, the immense expansion of the Communist Party in Indonesia under Sukarno, the persistence of the Communist movement in the Philippines even after the defeat of the so-called Huk Rebellion, the electoral victory of the Communist Party of India in Kerala in 195 7 and the consequent emergence of the world’s first elected Communist government there, the substantial presence of Communist Parties in Southern Europe in both the electoral and the outlawed zones of politics, and numerous such developments (in Iraq and Sudan, in Southern Africa, in Latin America) seemed to promise that the socialist dynamic was itself on the ascendant, certainly in the poorer zones of the globe but also on the margins of Western Europe itself, in many forms. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 93