You don't need to go shouting it, but if someone starts talking politics at you, fucking own it. Some coworker is like "trump sucks", say "yeah I know, I'm a communist". Your grandpa says "trump rules", say "no he sucks ass, I'm a communist". You're on a date and they ask who you're voting for? Say "I'm a communist". Cashier asks would you like change? "Yes, I am a communist".
Be open about your politics and lay claim to the title. Be a communist.
A lot like this society but politicians actually do what people want because they're accountable to worker councils and I don't spend 8 hours a day living in a dictatorship.
Out of character -- I don't recommend going into detail about utopian communism. Talk about the society you'll actually live in, not the utopian ideal we seek to achieve. We'll be gone before communism is actually achieved, we should talk about the real society that people will live under, the practical future.
Don't argue with people about history. Ask them about their lives, find the things that are fucked in their life and relate it to how the rich are stealing from them. Don't try to sell them communism itself as you'll hit a brick wall, agitate around the exploitation in their lives, find things to empaphise with them on, find the broken things in their world and agree with them how messed up those things are. Relate those broken things to the enemy. Talk about workers and how they're a worker and how you're both the same, build class consciousness.
Some people respond well to theoretical arguments. Others definitely do not. Actual ancaps (as rare as they are these days) are the types that will respond well to the former.
Unless you're dealing with a Sanders stan, never focus on completely rewriting the system. Avoid revolutionary terms at all cost, especially for anyone older than like 30ish, as they'll want to avoid disrupting what little stability they've already achieved.
Most of the main ideas of a socialist economy can be accomplished with seemingly minor classification changes (with obviously huge implications). You can present this framework as a series of "shortest-path" alterations from a hypothetical standpoint. You'll inevitably get the "well how do we actually get there?", and that's when you give the "well there's a lot of different thoughts on that, none of which are easy." You can gain quite a lot from presenting big theoretical changes as humble changes presented humbly.
With most people, you should definitely focus on listening to their issues and agitation.
Agreed. Avoid history unless someone directly throws it upon you. It's too much work for not enough benefit. But you cannot always avoid it.
I like to respond to "but Stalin!!1" by painting Stalin as being (correctly) paranoid about their new, fragile system from being destroyed from both powerful people inside and much more potent exterior powers. Say the U.S. was a huge threat because they wanted to capitalize on their people, and without the largest institutional threat (the U.S.), Stalin wouldn't have been so paranoid.
It fits with my response to "socialism has never worked". I say "the United States is the only place that socialism can work because there is no United States to destroy or invade it"...Not 100% true, but it allows you to brush off a lot of propaganda baggage as aggressive U.S. foreign policy and it's role & effects. Also "China adopted a weird variant of capitalism so that the United States wouldn't focus on destroying it."
Be very careful with this. Nothing will hurt your efforts more than misrepresenting their work or their problems and trying to commandeer their legitimate issues for political gain. You really should make sure you have a grasp of what their problems actually are before you go about suggesting solutions. Listen closely, especially at first. This is great advice for those you work alongside or those whose work you have intimate knowledge of. Less so for people where you have a decent chance at offending via having ulterior motives about their closely held struggles. This advice is best for building issue-oriented organization vs radicalization.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not saying suggest solutions. I find a good approach here is to hear their problem then respond with "that reminds me of" an experience either yourself or "a friend" has had, tell that story. Then you use that story to direct aggression and blame towards the class enemy. This then isn't going to be taken as "you know nothing about me" or come up against personal walls people put up around their lives. It's about you or someone else but in context of conversation people link it to themselves by way of how it flowed there. When I've been salting this has been a common interaction I've had around workplaces, someone says a problem they have then some other worker is reminded of their problem or a friends problem and blames that problem on migrants or something -- the original person then relates the blame on migrants to their problem themselves. It never hits any walls in this way and this seems to be how these trends spread through the workforce.
Much of my work salting has used this tactic to agitate a workforce into anger at managers and owners. Agitating in this way is half of the battle.