Challege/WI: Germany becomes the first Communist Nation

That's my whole point: revolutions are more likely to happen earlier on, because the longer you have capitalism the bigger the middle class gets.

Unless the middle class shrink back like it's happening right now. But before WWI is largely possible for a revolution in Western Europe. You could even argue that this period extend a few years after WWII (or else why the OSS would have fixed the first Italian elections after WWII).

Only if you cherry pick years and countries. If you take the median wage in Europe 15 years ago and now, it would be much higher now.

Actually i only know the figures for the US (and France) but the Median household income (ajusted for inflation) is pretty much stable since the end of the cold war. In France it is has only increased by 10 percent since 1990 and everyone in France knows that the inflation figures a largely underestimated.
 
There's also the matter of Capitalism reforming rather than staying hardline and thus allowing for things like social welfare and worker rights and protections. Though for a long time, it did not reform.

This is a fair point, but again, it addressed the proletariat rather than the petty bourgeosie and professionals of the middle class, whose own negotiating power drove protections rather than legal mandates. (See the fact that the vast majority of US professionals have holiday entitlement, despite no legal requirement.) Social welfare and workers rights are good things and stopped exploitation, but I'm not sure they were what was behind the growth of the middle class.

Actually i only know the figures for the US (and France) but the Median household income (ajusted for inflation) is pretty much stable since the end of the cold war. In France it is has only increased by 10 percent since 1990 and everyone in France knows that the inflation figures a largely underestimated.

The US is something of a special case, and I largely attribute it to the rigging of the tax system there. France has been worse than most of Europe because of poor productivity growth, but even there, a 10% improvement in living standards every twenty years isn't exactly consistent with Marx's view capitalism decimates the middle class is it? Particularly when hundreds of millions in emerging markets are seeing their incomes surge...

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be concerned about the middle class, or that government can't do more on top of the market to help them. I'm just arguing that Marx was wrong about the ever swelling ranks of the proletariat, and their increasing exploitation into absolute squalour.
 
But Ireland itself was dirt poor and oppressed by the British. You know, in the same way that India wasn't the happiest place on earth at the time. It's not hard to argue that Britain was the reason the Irish were poor. In fact, that's pretty much accepted history by now.
Although it's not entirely correct, mind you: The fact that the rural Irish still generally divided a farm up between the farmer's sons when he died meant that a higher proportion of the Irish remained on the land instead of going to seek their fortunes elsewhere than was the case for (for example) the English, but that the average size of farms and thus the average rural income therefore inevitably fell.
 
There's also the matter of Capitalism reforming rather than staying hardline and thus allowing for things like social welfare and worker rights and protections. Though for a long time, it did not reform.

But now the ultra-Right wants to cancel these reforms, at least in the US. And the people seem to be sitting ducks for it, not joining the Communist Party.:(
 
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