One annoying tendency in modern political discourse is right wingers and centrists calling people communist.
They don’t know what the word means.
A communist believes that the means of production should be owned and controlled by the proletariat: the workers.
If you don’t believe this, you aren’t a communist. Wanting universal healthcare doesn’t mean you’re a communist unless you think the health workers themselves (or, just perhaps, the party or government) should control the healthcare providers.
Wanting universal healthcare, in the modern context, makes you a socialist.
Now there’s a lot of argument around what it means for the proletariat to control the means of production. If the “Party” controls it, like in the USSR or pre-Deng China, is that communism, or is it just old fashioned government authoritarianism?
Is modern China communist? About half the economy isn’t controlled by the Party, and worker co-ops are minor players. There’s clearly a capitalist class controlling vast amounts of the means of production, though government is very willing to intervene. The Chinese Communist party says this is still communism but that seems like a stretch to me. The same is true in Vietnam: the Communist party is in charge, but the economy isn’t communist.
Note that you could have a market economy which IS communist. If workers co-ops or something similar control most of the organizations, that would be communism, and it’s something that a lot of intellectuals in America and Europe during the 50s pushed for: a sort of “best of both worlds.”
Centralized control economies like the USSR, from this point of view can’t really be communist, because the workers aren’t really controlling capital.
For myself, I’d say moving away from stock companies and towards a mix of worker owned organizations and perhaps mutual companies (or mixed versions) would be the best way to move towards something that might both be communist and workable, allowing the dynamism of the market.
Generally speaking my time in the workforce convinced me that upper management is usually clueless because they don’t do the job and haven’t done it in ages. You have to be on the front lines to have some idea what the issues actually are.
Communism is worker control of capital, and nothing else. We’ve never really tried it.