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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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