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It would probably help if the people trying to teach the normies actually understood what Communism was and moved beyond a Boomeric “anything I don’t like is Communism” mindset.
Problem is that we've gone so far down that road people said "fuck it" and now you have spicy social democrats claiming to be socialists now and kids larping as pro-Soviet communists because they follow Hasan Piker on TikTok.
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The big question is 'what do you mean by communism?'.
No, literally and unironically- you can have a command economy without it being communism(France has done it). You can have a society with substantial state ownership of the means of production without it being communism(modern China). You can have totalitarianism without it being communism(Saudi Arabia). If you ask communists themselves, they'll tell you communism refers to the utopian end state of the worker's paradise.
In practice, people use communism to refer to regimes run by Marxists. And it's worth looking at what Marxism is- definitions are important- Marxism is primarily a theory of history. This theory of history argues for economic processes, by far the most important being class conflict, as driving the events of history independent of great men. Basically everything Marx thought about economics was wrong(although not everything he thought about history was), but importantly, Marxism puts enough epicycles into its psychohistory that Marxists can retreat to unfalsifiability in order to defend their theories. So Marxists in charge of an economy- and all developed economies have at least some level of planning from the top- have economic theories which don't correspond to reality, and Marxists default to conspiracy theories and finger pointing when their plans don't work out. This tends to generate useless and counterproductive reprisals to try to stick to an economic plan with predetermined endpoints, because Marxists just don't stop and think that the labour theory of value prevents their spreadsheets from giving good predictions, and also because that Marxist psychohistory gives a utopian eschatology that justifies whatever the cost to stick to the plan. There is a reason traditional religions usually explicitly hold that our actions on earth can't bring about the apocalypse/mahdi/end of the kali yuga- because putting entire societies behind dumb plans is a bad thing that tends to break the machinery which makes that society run.
I think, in a real way, what makes Marxism so bad is the tendency for it to be a kind of fanaticism for the un-lindy. Religious fundamentalists rarely break the essential functioning of their societies; I suppose fascists probably could, but historical fascist regimes have lost wars instead. And of course monarchs rise to power by making deals and sticking to them, while democracies tend to prevent fanatics from holding unfettered power.
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This is of course impossible, and therefore unactionable advice.
People will always carry epithets to just mean bad in the broadest sense, fascists and communists and liberals all know this. But that does not matter. Were communism to rebrand itself as "super capitalism" as /leftypol/ liked to meme, it wouldn't solve it's inherent problems, which is what OP is looking to put a light on.
It is the territory that matters, the map is just an instrumental accessory.
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I think this comment encapsulates why we will probably end up with communism again (or at least communism-lite).
It's not about reason-based arguments. It is about signalling and reacting to "boomers" in an effort to increase one's personal social status. The more extreme those beliefs the better. And what's more extreme than advocating for the most destructive ideology of the 20th century?
I’m not trying to be cool or overly snarky. But that generation really abused the term until it lost all meaning. Everything from socialized medicine to five private corporations telling you what you could think fell under the moniker of communism. The FBI hauling dissidents off to the gulag in the middle of the night and listening to all communications was a necessary measure to defeat communism. Obama was an Islamo-Fascist-Communist. Now the highly-regarded zoomers on R/WorldNews are copying their parents and grandparents and calling me a pinko communist because I won’t take up Ronald Reagan’s grand crusade against Russia (they conveniently forget that Russia is no longer communist). I find Kamala Harris horrifying, but calling anything she’s going to do communist is just farcical. I don’t really mind that kind of rhetoric from Trump because he’s always had a rather fluid rhetorical style when it comes to his put downs, but it becomes grating when the serious minds start trying to come up with justifications about why she really is.
I hate to inject current events into a fine discussion of political ideology.
But what else do you call politicians who want to institute wealth taxes for redistribution and price controls? Socialists at the very least to be sure.
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