Why were western writer specifically attracted to the communist party?

I recently read Richard Wright’s autobiography which dealt in part with his tumultuous time as a member of a U.S. communist group in the 1930’s. I also read a number of Orwell’s essays written shortly after the Spanish civil war in which he discusses the ideology. One thing he mentioned in particular (partly quoted below) was about how much self-censorship communists western writers did during that time. Since nearly all US/UK communist parties were more or less emulating USSR standards.

Among the many issues Wright encountered while he was a member was the constant peer pressure to censor not just what he said in official writings (eg for their magazine), but also his own work. If any party member stepped out of line (or was even perceived to have - which was troublesome due to how much paranoia raged throughout the group) all sorts of bullying tactics were use. Such as expelling, threatening, shunning, attempting to get former members fired at their job, and even assaulting them on the streets.

This level of censorship seems to completely counter the desire for freedom of expression - something I have noticed is more common in writers/artists than the average person. Or am I missing something?

But the other question I have was in general what caused writers specifically to be drawn to communism? Most often when reading the work of those in favor, they talk most earnestly of social and economic equality for all. But if that was truly their end goal, socialism alone seems more closely to align with that without the need for censorship, and from what i understand was a moderately prevalent & established ideology at the turn of the 20th century (and had a number of notable writers gaining success releasing works with string sociological themes - eg Upton Sinclair & Jack London & Orwell).

A while ago I read an essay by Chomsky in which he quoted a bit by either Marx or Engels indicating that the ideology has always hinted at a sort of aristocratic literati. Was this what really brought so many writers in (more than addressing the inevitable economic inequality of socialism alone) - that with a revolution that frees the workers & disposed of great economic inequality there will still be a special place right of the ideological rulers throne for the artists providing entertainment?

Or is that far too pessimistic?

Orwell:

On the whole the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up. It is, of course, possible to toe the line and go on writing—after a fashion. […] Literature as we know it is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. […] it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has been so barren of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but practically no fiction of any value at all. From 1933 onwards the mental climate was increasingly against it. Anyone sensitive enough to be touched by the Zeitgeist was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of course, was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone was on its periphery and more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns and squalid controversies. Communists and near-Communists had a disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a sort of voluntary censorship ('Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist?') was at work in nearly everyone's mind.

It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. 'Good novels are not written by by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.