zesamofdepast
Banned
You just need to make it so that by 1960, TTL's analogue to the UK is a Marxist-Leninist state. Bonus points if they are part of the Warsaw Pact.
The only thing I can think of is a totally isolationist US letting the Red Army conquer all of western Europe. Not very likely.
Just throwing it out there, but is the 'night watchman state' of pre ww2 Britain a big impediment? Communistt governments are big governments that take a lot of power and responsibilities for themselves so it might be more likely that counties with a traditional big government would turn to communism as a way to run these big governments. In contrast the British government did less than others so might be less likely to turn to communism as it would have less effect there than elsewhere, they would have to build a big government in in process which is an extra step .
The British government before World War Ii was far from a "night watchman" state, but in any event the reason that a Communist revolution was unlikely had very little to do with the size of the government It was simply that British workers felt their interests were served by the non-revolutionary Labour Party. In any event, there wasn't a successful Communist revolution anywhere in the 1930's. At the beginning of the 1930's the only states controlled by Communists were the USSR, Outer Mongolia, and Tuva. This was still true at the end of the 1930's (though the USSR expanded a bit at the very end of the decade as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).
Just throwing it out there, but is the 'night watchman state' of pre ww2 Britain a big impediment? Communistt governments are big governments that take a lot of power and responsibilities for themselves so it might be more likely that counties with a traditional big government would turn to communism as a way to run these big governments. In contrast the British government did less than others so might be less likely to turn to communism as it would have less effect there than elsewhere, they would have to build a big government in in process which is an extra step .
Why in the name of all that's holy would any large, powerful government turn to Communism? That's like saying that a country with lots of tanks might be tempted to replace all of those tanks with Mad Max style rickety re-purposed semi-trucks with spikes welded on them since they are both large internal combustion driven vehicles...
Also, the people who run governments (even Communist governments) aren't known for their good relations with the working class.
It seems to me that for omnigovernments in crisis to find Communism an attractive replacement you would need both for the ATL communism to out-perform all other acceptable systems, and to have less ideological tension between the "great and the good" and the champions of Communist ideology.
fasquardon
Communism is an ideology about how to run a country and is practice is a form of 'statism' with the bereaucratic machinery of government used to run gulags, disposess clever peasants and fuck up the economy . My suggestion is that the less machinery of government that exists the less a revolutionary political party has to take hold of in the name of communism, makiing less attractive to revolutionsries. Indeed the less government there is the less opportunuty there is for incompetence in the first place to generate the revolution.