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I think the surest path to success is to play dirty. Play the man and not the ball.
Make communism look creepy and weird. Hammer home imagery of some fat, ugly blue-haired woman, or this soyboy: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIbHYhPVoAEIxzs.jpg
Then dive deep into Beria's sex crimes and pedophilia, Mao's sex crimes and venereal diseases, his rotten teeth... Establish that communism is led by losers, it's run for losers and makes winners into losers. Dive into the gruesome crimes of NKVD officials, the torture, the encouragement of children to report on their parents. Focus on how everything was broken, how Soviet televisions exploded from time to time, they couldn't get anything done correctly... Imply that the benefits of communism flow solely to a class of ugly, bald, fat middle-aged men who are the best connivers and plotters. It doesn't need to be coherent that we're casting communists as ineffectual weaklings and dangerous criminals, this isn't a rational argument but an aesthetic one.
Resist at all costs the urge to glamourize it as a mighty dragon that we have slain. No Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 memes. No World in Conflict cutscenes or Soviet military parades. Choke out all evidence of vital energy and coolness.
Amazon's Man in the High Castle was supposed to be anti-Nazi but it made Nazism look cool. They had supersonic jet travel, H-bombs, sick uniforms, big strong men marching in columns, enormous halls, the vigorous and manly Obergruppenfuhrer Smith. Lots of Nazis liked the show (or the 5 minute edits made of it), they skipped the boring bits about how eugenics was so bad and the angst of women and gays. No amount of hamfisted 'oh the Nazis go around destroying American monuments and eventually retreat from America for no good reason' could undo the damage those few minutes showing the Volkshalle did.
I will admit, by the end of Man in the High Castle, I wasn't entirely against the Nazis. Perhaps a part of it was the rapidly deteriorating state of my own world, paying an ever increasing diversity tax in an increasingly violent and low trust society. Perhaps a part of it was the way the show had not the founding stock, and founding principles, of America rising up to save it. Instead that task fell to black communist who rescue an America only too happy to collaborate with the Nazi's (but which suddenly found themselves free of them) from their own rotten soul. I mean, if you make me choose between black communist and Nazi's, I'm choosing the Nazi's 1000% of the time.
The black Communist didn't save America. John Smith was supposed to have -- he was supposed to have been playing the long game, rising to the top of the American Nazi hierarchy and then breaking with Berlin and restoring America, but he turned Nazi in truth. It's implied that after his suicide, his second in command (Bill Whitcroft, as white a guy as you can ask for) in fact will do this.
The Bill Whitcroft character is the weakest of window dressing to the moral themes the show is muddling through. He barely exist. Tell me how many episodes he was in? Tell me one other thing about him? What was his character arc? What does he stand for? He's in the background, nearly invisible for an amount of time I can scarcely recall, then suddenly he asserts himself like a Deus Ex Machine in the last episode or two? He might as well be Harrison Ford's phoned in voice over at the end of Blade Runner. He's a meaningless non entity, a utilitarian script gimmick, who does not engage with the themes of show what so ever. And the themes are clear, and they draw from fictitious historical works like the 1619 Project, especially towards the end as the black communist story arc progresses, and they become the moral center of the show, who's principles go entirely unexamined and unchallenged, even as they monologue that the Nazi's and the American's weren't all that different to them.
He's there to hold out the hope of some sort of positive ending that, given the conditions, simply should not be possible, which is why he's so weak as a character. Yes, a deus ex machina, but the fact that the writers felt the need to have that (rather than let the black communists win, or just devolving into chaos) is significant. The idea of Smith playing the long game isn't weak like that, they hint at it throughout at least the later seasons.
That the black communists in the show think the Americans and the Nazis were pretty much the same is what you'd expect from such a group (compare Muhammad Ali's "No Viet Cong ever called me [the N-word]") but it doesn't mean the show was actually endorsing that view. Kido essentially makes the same claim to Frank Frink at Manzanar; are we supposed to believe him too? No, the show clearly prefers the old America over Nazi or Japanese rule, even if it refuses to idealize it.
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I had the same thought about Wolfenstein: The New Order, weirdly enough. Nazi-controlled London in that game looked substantially grander than the real London ever did.
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I'd say that was all a calculated ruse. They packed Season 1, especially the first part, with Nazi aesthetics in order to lure in the chuds, the dudebros, all the middle-class grillers that are at least sympathetic to the less cucky expressions of rightism. They did that to fool them and keep them watching, with them hoping that it'll stay that way, but in the later seasons, they were hit with the usual woke shit.
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It's also useful to think about how Communism made itself inspiring. You have bold posters of attractive, young, bold comrades ushering in a new world; powerful displays of military might and stories of the underdog throwing off the yoke of foreign oppressors through sheer will and heroism; technological marvels invented by Communism. (And, of course, the enemy is ugly, misshapen, obese old capitalist men.)
Turn that around. Create an unashamed capitalist aesthetic of beauty and power and success. If you do that, it's barely even necessary to paint Communists in any light at all. We certainly don't have that at all today. Probably Musk is the closest to that aesthetic, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.
Oh, well, this is a first for me. Merging two current and active threads.
There is an interesting potential connection to this thread (tagging @jeroboam for awareness).
What if a way to encourage more children is to simply have a bunch of posters of attractive young people pumping out babies.
Yes, on two level. First, hate to say this, but Musk does code as .... weird. A lot of the Musk superfans are that precisely because they see Captain Aspergers doing so well and think, "one of us! one of us!" Normies might like Teslas, but they don't get Musk at all.
Second, he's a pretty awful model for paternal responsibility. By my count, he's got 12 kids with 3 women. Although those aren't Antonio Cromartie numbers, they're still up there. Again, a bad model for normies.
We need conserva-Chads. The frackas with Harrison Butker a few months back showed how those battle lines could get drawn.
On the one hand, that's why normies ended up getting their fancy electric cars from Tesla. As the old economics joke goes, there can't be a hundred dollar bill plainly lying on the ground, because someone would have picked it up already. Musk had to search through muck like "electric motors are for golf carts" and "it's literally rocket science, you're not going to beat Boeing or Lockheed!" to find his hundred billion dollar bills, because if you pursue ideas that any normie can see aren't stupid, then the normies probably already did, and some of them are way ahead of you to monetizing them.
On the other hand, most apparently-stupid ideas are apparently stupid because in fact they are actually stupid. In PvE fields like engineering that's still fine, because the math or the testing will winnow out the bad ideas anyway. If you try out 199 failed filament materials and one good one then you don't become famous as a 99.5% failure, you become famous as the guy who invented the light bulb. But in PvP fields like social media / business / politics, taking stupid ideas seriously in public burns credibility, wasting social capital you could have put to better use elsewhere. Musk does have enough actual capital to not care so much about that, and I can't help but be amused by someone using "fuck-you money" to literally tell people "fuck you", but he's investing in so many good causes that I wish he wouldn't waste so much opportunity cost on bad ones.
6 kids (5 surviving, one died of SIDS) with his first wife, one of whom publicly hates him. 3 kids (X, Exa, and Tau) with a later girlfriend (after his second divorce to his second wife, his third divorce total) who he's currently fighting for custody. 3 biological kids via IVF with one of his employees at Neuralink. This sounds like a bad model for Musk, not just a bad model for normies.
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His personal life is a shambles, but so long as he doesn't flaunt it (and people only speak of it in hushed, ashamed tones), I don't care too much.
What he needs to do is: every time he feels compelled to share a 4chan greentext on Twitter, he should stop for a second, think about if it's a good use of his time, realize it's not, and instead take that energy and make another revolutionary, innovative, billion dollar company. We'd all be better off.
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To me, there needs to be a way to distill the James Taggarts of the fictional world into an image. Rand wrote outlandish heroes but compelling villains. That imagery is effective.
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E/acc version: https://x.com/yasser_elsaid_/status/1827755425443328139
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Thats what we have now! Capitalism produced Reagan, a square jaw movie hero turned president. Communism gave us Brezhnev, Castro, Mao and Kim Il Sung, all manner of fat ugly aesthetically and behaviorally discomforting golems. Even communist attempts at beautiful art were mediocre shitpiles, with Soviet Realism being a pastel pastiche of the colouring of Old Masters overlaid onto garish parodies of reality.
Communism is UGLY and gave us brutalism, plasticised film dolls ironically more unnatural than the west, and unaccountable leaders who didn't have any physical charisma at all. Che Guevera adorns all commie flags because he's the ONLY good looking commie. For every 10 Che simps there are 1000 posters of capitalists to simp over. But commies have ONLY Che to adorn.
Stalin looks like a respectable head of state, and was (according to women)quite fetching in his younger days.
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Brezhnev. Mao and Kim Il Sung counted as average-looking men in their respective societies, I'd say. And Castro was a handsome man, supposedly.
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That was half a century ago. We now have Biden, Trump and Kamala.
Still better than capitalist attempts at beautiful art we are currently being served. We just had a thread about how capitalism can't even do proper pop-culture slop anymore.
In capitalism the mere suggestion that we should have beautiful public spaces will get you purged from the party.
Who are marxists in all but name.
Even Newsweek has acknowledged that republicans are more attractive
Well, I included Trump on the list, he's no Adonis either.
Ben Garrison shows us the Trumps we see in our hearts but not our eyes, for his radiance burns our feeble eyeballs.
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Age will have that effect, dude is 78.
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Yea I get that, I truly truly truly do! Modern DEI wokism gives us distorted faces from ME:Andromeda and Star Wars Outlaws to design shitpiles like Concord or Dustborn, while the successors of communism give us gacha ptsd waifus and robot fuckdolls.
BUT that doesn't change the fact that communism is STILL ugly. Modern Starbucks seattle commies overlap with the capitalist class you rightly decry, pinning the hammer and sickle badges on their newsboy caps as they slave under capitalism, showing that true commies can't make anything beautiful. I think even the commie furries make ugly shit, with anything resembling beauty overlapping with nazbol furries.
I do not mean to be purely combative, but I really wish to know: what communist beauty actually is there? I am probably cheating by excluding modern China and its cultural/physical outputs, but like I really don't see communists producing anything beautiful historically.
If the Wikipedia page on “Stalinist architecture” is anything to go by, then communists have produced some things of beauty. Although a quick wiki skim suggests that the communists pre-Stalin were just as strongly married to their hideous architecture as our own architects of today are.
/images/17254340944042058.webp
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That space realism shit they had going on in frescas was great, you got your muscular dude grabing the atom flying through space, you got your worker man and woman both beutifully detailed with their muscles wrangling a work implement vaguely in the direction of forward or upward. At least the artists in the CCCP knew what human beuty looked like.
Just look at it.
The west has lost even the will to depict this energy. I want my mass media to tell me, we're fucking going to space, and you and your wife will toil to make it happen. We're getting on that bloody moon rock or die trying.
Are you telling me that Memphis Corporate doesn't get you fucking JACKED UP to knock out some spreadsheets?!
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Ok this one goes pretty hard. I dont put much stock in soviet films, architecture or music (plastic people of the universe arent soviet and its not possible to enjoy their music sober), and i already expressed disdain for soviet realism, but this poster fucks.
I personally blame the hays code for the weird plastic archie comics style plasticised all american boy aesthetic that permeated even the space raygun era of american science fiction art. ironically, watching out for commies made the outputs commie level fails. thanks hoover.
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That's ok, I was mostly being contrarian for the fun of it, though it is interesting just how far I can take stuff like I wrote above without leaning into LARPing.
Though one problem I have with the question you're asking is that the parameters aren't clear. What is "communist beauty"?
Not just purely preservational/restorative. The Saint Petersburg and Moscow metros are gorgeous and clean. Compare to the metros in American cities, where you have a decent chance of having to step over poop or deal with a meth addict smoking on the train, surrounded by Corporate Memphis posters.
The ONLY thing appealing about communism is 'we promise to get rid of the degenerates you hate'. The low hanging fruit of public drunks and mentally incapacitated malcontents is a universal scourge everyone cheers to have removed. It is when the jackboots search for more necks to step on when the appeal loses out.
Whether the removed are helped or locked up is inconsequential. We just son't want them enshittifying our public space.
The downfall of western public spaces is entirely because criminal malcontents, especially but not limited to the highly melanated, act freely without sanction. Get rid of them and the animating disgust normies have will no longer be misdirected towards progcommie 'harm reduction' bullshit.
Seriously? The only reason people endorse communism is to stomp on black criminals?
If you’re going to toss out theories like these, you need to put in more work making them coherent. There are any number of ways to be more accurate and less inflammatory.
Banned for one week.
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I thought the St Petersburg metro got started under the Tsar? If they continued to expand it while keeping it's style, I guess that should still count.
Looking at Wikipedia pages, both Moscow and Saint Petersburg appear post-revolutionary. There were talks of a metro in pre-revolution times, but those plans were for it to be above ground.
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I think emphasising the emotional tone of the imagery is an important point. I don't think tankies would exist if the yellow hammer-and-sickle on the red flag wasn't such a striking image, or if Katyusha wasn't such a banger, or if there weren't those giant statues of Lenin, or if socialist realism wasn't a recipe for such great posters. No one wants to drape themselves in the imagery of a pathetic loser - they want to drape themselves in the imagery of strength and purpose. The same aesthetic ingredients that make Red Alert such a fun game also make Soviet or communist ideology appealing.
Communism today still has a lot of left-over cachet from the Cold War, where it was perceived as the alternative to Western capitalism and liberal democracy. If you don't like the current system and want something else... it's there. I don't think it made it to the main blog (frankly I think the ACX readership has very questionable taste in book reviews), but the 2024 ACX reviews included Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, which I thought helped to convey the way that it was the default alternative. If you didn't like capitalism, it was the natural place to go.
In the current moment, memory of Cold-War-era horrors is fading, and surviving communist states from that era are either dismissable or have reformed in less communist ways (most obviously China, of course, but modern Vietnam is probably a more typical example), but there's still a lingering sense that communism is the alternative.
The combination of that status as the most prominent alternative, a really cool or appealing aesthetic, and a simple and intuitive pitch makes it relatively easy to sell.
It is worth noting that social democratic parties who reject the Russian Revolution as a model and "Communist" as a label and kick out tankies come into being almost immediately - the first unequivocal example being the SPD/USPD split in the 1918 German revolution. By 1922 the dominant left-wing parties in the UK, France and Germany are all explicitly anti-Communist.
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The cruel irony is that rather than being an alternative to the potential failures of capitalism, Communism merely fortifies all of those failure modesand traps them into a single funnel that's certain to fail. You don't like being exploited by any number of employers? Now there's only one employer who will treat you even worse, and you can never quit your job!
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Well, at least somebody read my book review!
That was yours? I thought it was excellent.
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I enjoyed it! Thank you for the window into that short period of history where sincere, self-confident Marxism-Leninism seemed to be on the ascendant, and proudly evangelised itself as such.
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