I know it have a whole mechanic around material conditions and radicalism, like do you have to deliberately make things shitty for the working class? Can the middle class become fascist if their conditions deteriorates too?
Gotta get a lot of labourers, and slowly change the laws to increase the franchise. By necessity this will require coddling the Intelligentsia and the Industrialists, who initially have a lot in common with the labourers.
But as you develop and the Labourers gain population and power the cracks in the anti-Landowner/Church/Aristo/Military alliance start to show.
In my games the Trade Unions went Succ Dem, and then after they became dominant the Military decided communism was for them. Not seen our Anarchist comrades yet.
One thing is that while the Industrialists may well revolt, by the time they do revolution is almost a formality. You change the government to a council republic once enough politically active people want it.
You just need to get rid of the subsistence farms and turn the peasants into laborers etc. If your country has a strong landowner class or clergy then it seems like worth it to empower the industrialists and the middle class through laws to speed up the process. What you want in the end is a strong intelligentsia and unions, they should just become communists over time on their own. Country folk can be helpful at the start (they were for me the first to form a communist party), but become reactionaries pretty soon. The middle class does become fascist at some point in the process, but I haven't seen them cause any problems.
I've heard it described as a "decent historical materialism simulator," so you just have to go through those steps. Subsistence farmers -> proletariat, the in-game dialectic of industrializing economically and liberalizing politically. This is entirely vibes-based and could be wrong, but the developers have spoken before about how (despite personal right-leaning politics) they used Marxism to "fill in the blanks," between their liberal understanding of history as discreet events and people.
I also haven't played enough, gotta waste work time now though
I kind of did the opposite lol. I just consistently pushed through reforms until I got to where I wanted, which meant fighting three different civil wars. Once when I abolished the monarchy, I think the second one was just from a combination of things like enacting universal suffrage and the like, and then a third when I switched to a council republic. I think I'm like 50 years in now, and have only just finished my reforms in the last couple of years, so it's probably not the fastest way to go about it, but it worked eventually :shrug-outta-hecks:
One downside of the reform path though is that it takes forever, and I basically never had fewer than 400k radicals for the whole like 50 years that it took
Be aware, trade unions and farmer factions that come to dominate communist/anarchist states tend to oppose multiculturalism, free migration, elected bureaucrats, and police
You'll want to get them (police become kinda unnecessary anyway though) during the time that industrialists+Intelligentsia dominate after you push the church and other classical reactionaries aside, but before the workers activate.
Intelligentsia also opposes elected bureaucrats.
Multiculturalism + free migration are the important ones for a communist/anarchist country, since you can get an extra 25% immigration attraction from the journal and it's very easy to pass the best laws, so you'll get a not-insignificant chunk of the world's population moving in.
I just want to second this point. I didn't really plan it out, so I ended up with a council republic before enacting women's suffrage. Now there's not enough political interest for me to change it, but I'm still getting the suffragette events. Hopefully that'll lead to something eventually, but if I had done it properly I could have made the change several years prior to where I am now.
At least now I've learned that you can swap interest groups in and out of your government to tweak laws as you need to, as long as you can do it without effecting your legitimacy too much. But more importantly, I learned that you can't even try to institute a law unless there's at least one interest group in your government that supports it. I learned that the hard way, while I was in the process of switching to a council republic. I kicked the intelligentsia and the industrialists out of government, without realizing that they were the only two groups supporting the women's suffrage law. And then they both joined the revolution trying to stop the change, which meant that they had no clout left when the civil war was over, so I had no way to change the suffrage law any more. Which is how I ended up in the situation I described at the top lol
I think I'm pretty much done with that playthrough, and after another 5-6+ years I still didn't get anything. At that point I was pretty much exclusively getting leaders with communism/vanguardist for the biggest interest groups. The suffragette events just kept giving me the option to boost the industrialists, but I don't think their leader had the feminist ideology. And they had like 3% clout, so in either case it wouldn't have helped
Oh yeah definitely. If you're willing to take the extra time, you can be strategic with it and rely on the free reform after each election, since that won't generate radicals
As others have said, increase laborer pops, increase labor party draw.
I haven't tried it, but if they have high pop, but not enough clout to pass the laws, you can probably get the labor party to revolt, then lose on purpose.
