So in normal gameplay the peasants are very politically inactive and are very reactionary by default, and to radicalize the people the game expects you to proletarize the people first by industrializing and not doing reforms. But on twitter I've seen people saying that the peasants are the ones who form communist party in their game, while in my games the trade unionists (urban proletariats) often ends up being socdems with the intelligentsia instead. What steps am I missing?
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To get the peasantry to gain any ideology, you would need for them to get politically involved, which from what I understand means getting very high literacy rates. Also, obviously, the technology Socialism is a pre-req for any of this.
Beyond that, I think it's kind of random, because the ideology of a given group seems to be determined exclusively by their leader, which is RNG within a pool. I've had communist Intelligentsia who were quite pleased with my at the time socdem government, so you don't need to make people hate you in order to get commies to show up. I've seen claims that you can even get communist Armed Forces, though that may only be possible after socialism of some sort is established.
The Trade Unionists went fascist in my game because their leader was an ethnonationalist :deeper-sadness:
Samuel Gompers!?!?!
I can confirm that you can get communist armed forces without being a socialist country. I got them a couple of times while playing as Sokoto. On each occassion, it was before I even reformed my government type (so was still a caliphate). No idea what the triggers are. I think perhaps you just need to have researched socialism in the tech-tree for it to be able to trigger?