don't most communist countries hate art for the potential of being rebellious? Capitalism may suck but it suck less when your life's put on the line for making fun of their country's government.
Well, yes and no.
In all communist countries, art was censored, and there were several layers for that.
For example, during the Cold War, artists had to register in various "unions" or "associations". Those unions, like all so-called "trade unions", existed not to serve the workers, but were more like HR departments of the company known as the socialist state. Actual workers' unions were illegal.
You could do art if you weren't in the union, but good luck getting paid anything more that a symbolic sum. Publishers generally published only stuff from unionized artists. And good luck trying to be a publisher yourself: you'd either have to go through tons of red tape and get a government censor on board, or to gulag you go (although that was for the most egregious cases, usually you'd simply get roughed up by the cops, lose your equipment and your job, forcing you to move to the lowest strata of the society). Of course in the era of physical media, the initial costs would deter any wannabe publishers, so almost all publishers were state-owned, with only a handful being cooperatives.
(Well, you could also be an artist working full time in a studio on larger projects, like drawing cartoons in Soyuzmultfilm, or playing violin in a philharmonic orchestra, but that would mean you'd be working on something that someone else has creative control on.)
To get into the union, you'd need to prove to be worthy. This required showcasing a body of work that was both of good quality and correct values. It was a bit easier if you had a relevant art degree, as your student works could be evaluated. Only after you joined the union, you could go full time.
There were tons of way to get kicked out of the union, like publishing your work at non-approved publishers (that's what happened to Boris Pasternak after he published Doctor Zhivago in Italy), or simply not being socialist enough. Political correctness was required. Censors would look for what we'd call today "microaggressions" against socialism and the ruling class in the works, and force the authors to change them. Sometimes it was some stupid shit like changing a color of some random inconsequential thing from red to something else, so people wouldn't get any political interpretations out of that. This would happen both before publication, and sometimes even after publication. And sometimes the censors would decide that the whole thing is beyond saving and say "nope, you cannot publish that".
Publishers were fickle and wouldn't publish willy-nilly. To be fair, paper and vinyl were and still are expensive.
And depending on the era, an artist would be "very gently suggested" to create some propaganda pieces. It was the most common during the Stalin era. Pick any Soviet or Eastern European poet from the 40s/50s and among their works you'll find several cringy poems dedicated to praising Stalin. Painters and illustrators would either draw portraits of the leaders, or heroic working class people heroically doing their mundane jobs. Not making those meant you weren't socialist enough, which meant kicking out from the union, which mean job search, ending in some grunt work in a factory on the other side of the country, as you couldn't get a good job with such a black mark of your resume.
(And no, you couldn't coast off your previous royalties, because 1) the royalties were shit and 2) it was literally illegal to be unemployed. And even if for some reason you could scrape by by doing art outside of the union, not being in the union and not having any other job counted as being unemployed.)
Now, given there's internet now, and publishing is both easier and cheaper, the landscape is different. I found out today about a huge drama that swept across the Chinese web novel scene few years ago, the censors finally caught up with the times and nuked like most of it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/ppcw2g/web_novels_one_authors_modest_proposal_and_the/ So while the medium is different, and there's a bit more free market, the old communist principles of censoring the art for the sake of socialism are still applicable.