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Notes -
Communism is a political and economic system under which the means of production are under state ownership rather than private property. In the contemporary US, this is very much a minority position, I recon that the fraction of voters who want to abolish private businesses is about as large as the fraction which yearns for the reintroduction of feudalism -- both should poll about the Lizardman's constant.
Basically, when the left wants to regulate something about corporations, the right will surely cry "Communism". Not that the right is generally a very good champion of laissez-faire capitalism. There is a broad consensus that businesses need regulation, though there is disagreement on the amount and the particulars.
Mostly, the control the government has over corporations is not by virtue of ownership but because existing regulations have enough leeway in them that its agencies could just adopt a regulatory interpretation which will destroy their business model.
The Aryanization of TikTok last year is one such example of the power the state has over businesses. My understanding is that it was a bipartisan effort. Congress had decided that having the lion's share of short form videos rotting the brains of kids under control of the Chinese was a national security risk. So they passed a law to remedy that, and because Trump was in charge he managed to have have one of his allies take control of it, thereby ensuring that Red Chinese propaganda will not reach the impressionable minds of future generations.
No, that's socialism. Communism, as the name suggests, is "commune-ism", where there's no need for individual ownership because people care about others as much as themselves. This works pretty well at small scales and utterly-terribly at country scales due to human nature.
The confusion is because Marx claimed that socialism was a necessary stepping-stone to achieving successful large-scale communism, and hence the Marxist countries (which were socialist, and said as much - "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", "socialism with Chinese characteristics") were/are frequently governed by Communist Parties (named such aspirationally).
Valid nitpick.
Also, Potato, potato.
For practical purposes of non-fantasy economic systems beyond Dunbar's number, it makes no difference if they are owned collectively by the population or by the state. If I am digging holes in my back garden under the mistaken impression that there is gold to be found, I can insist all day long that this is just the exploratory phase and the proper gold mine will come once the assay is done, in practice I will end up with garden with a lot of holes in it (which will come handy for the mass graves though, to stretch my metaphor a bit).
I also think Marx was intentionally vague on these letter steps after the necessary but distasteful dictatorship of the proletariat. After all, our minds are toiling under the yoke of capitalism and class struggles, so we can not even hope to grasp the heights to which the human spirit could soar without these fetters. (All horseshit, obviously.)
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The DSA is much more popular than Moldbug.
And that is before you consider the faction of the Republican party that thinks private-sector companies in strategic sectors should be required to give large equity stakes to the government as a condition of being allowed to operate.
Between MAGA communists and DSA communists, I think the percentage of Americans who favour the state seizing the means of production is at least 20%. I would guess the equivalent figure is >30% in most western European countries, and >50% in France where both the Gaullist right and the mainstream left have particularly strong communist traditions.
Those are fascists, not communists. They want the companies to be mostly privately run but with an easy-to-use government veto over their decisions. It's still bad, but economically not as disastrous.
I'm with Orwell on this - I think they are equivalent in substance and differ only in coalitional politics. If you didn't already know, would you be able to work out which of "National Socialism" and "Socialism in One Country" was the fascist slogan and which was the communist one?
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