Rakisa

Yup, Alaskaball already described this process in detail, but the gist of it is you will have an almost all reactionary government at the beginning of the game in almost all countries. As you develop further, the landowners will lose influence as their base of power becomes diluted by industrialists owning more of the means of production. It's worth checking in on your government every few years to see how the IG power percentages have changed. As you play the game more you'll get a feeling for how close you are to being ready for enacting the council republic law. Definitely just focus on building up your industry like I mentioned in my first post.

Edit: the religious IG can be made pretty irrelevant if you change the PMs for the cities/universities/government admin buildings.

Collatz_problem is correct on both counts for the armed forces and religious IGs. I just want to add that you can use this general cheese on any ideology capable of taking up the communist ideology (so TUs, AF, I think rurals?), so an easy way to get a communist leader of the TUs is actually to have a communist general that is part of the TUs. Once the leader dies/retires the existing characters have a chance to get that role based on popularity and influence. You can actually see those chances if you click an IG and scroll down to the Leader Ideologies drop down.

There's a few pre-reqs, first you need socialism in the tech tree, until that you're really not getting anywhere. Once it's researched and people are miserable enough (below 10 SOL IIRC) you'll get a socialist movement and this is your first real springboard. You basically need enough supporters of the trade unions (TUs) to make passing the law feasible (or at least, not lose all your states in a counter revolution.)

Above all else you need to build industry since they give you laborers who mostly align with the TUs, the core of this will be lumber mills, tool workshops, and iron mines in the early game since they all feed each other. Try to avoid building anything agricultural since agricultural workers are far less effective in getting the TUs in power.

To your direct question about the petit-bourgeoisie (PBs) no in most cases will actually impede the socialist revolution, but they're part of industrialization so you gotta just accept they will be there. The rural folk/agrarian IG is fine, it can get a socialist leader on occasion but I wouldn't count on it. If you do want to get the rurals on your side, mostly keep them miserable, so this means tenant farmers or commercial farming in the laws, not homesteading. Homesteading will effectively make them wealthy enough to not want socialism.

Great post comrade. Your posts about the PSL is part of what motivated me to start interacting with my local one, and I know some of them went to the local protests.

WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE TO WIN VIOLENT STRUGGLE AND YOU NEED TO GO WHERE THE MASSES ARE TO RALLY THEM TO OUR CAUSE.

This is something I think about a lot, esp in counter to the people (often libs) who just think Americans are idiots and can't be reached. I sympathize with their frustrations but this is what we got and what we have to work with. Can't just throw up our hands and give up.

This is awful, I am a graduate of job corps, before I went into it I was homeless. The program helped me get to a point where I could actually live a decent life, and I don't think I would've been able to otherwise. Of all the people I knew at my time there, many were like me in that they had no place to go back to, or it was abusive. The government is condemning the young folks in these places to misery and death, straight up social murder.

One of their better episodes, Kate brings such a great energy to the podcast. They should have her on more

Depends on when but I'm definitely interested