In a lot of ways, the same happened in the Soviet Union. The poor farmers were never socialists. Socialism was imposed on them by upper-middle-class intellectua

In a lot of ways, the same happened in the Soviet Union. The poor farmers were never socialists. Socialism was imposed on them by upper-middle-class intellectuals. The poor farmers wanted to stop being serfs, but only so that they could own their own land. That wouldn't make them quite millionaires, but they imagined that they'd be comfortably-well-off. (Today, a millionaire is not much more than comfortably-well-off, but in Steinbeck's time it put you in Jay Gatsby territory.) So the proper socialist revolution never happened. The workers never got control of the means of production. It just passed from an obscenely-wealthy autocrat to a bunch of oligarchs, who promptly made themselves wealthy. It does seem to be pretty good evidence that the socialist revolution is never coming. Even if it's in everybody's best interest on paper, it's too hard to get them all on the same page. It's a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma: there are just too many reasons for people to conclude that their short-term interest outweighs the global long-term interest.