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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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