People use "communist" as a generic slur - there's probably people who called Joseph McCarthy a communist too.

Is that really the point you're trying to make? That calling someone "communist" has no meaning these days?

Otherwise, you can read how in 1923 Ford wrote that communism has failed. In his own words, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.260931/page/n1...

"As soon as [Russia] began to run her factories by committees, they went to rack and ruin; there was more debate than production. .. The fanatics talked the people into starvation. ... Bolshevism is now crying for the brains and experience which it yesterday treated so ruthlessly. All that “reform” did to Russia was to block production. ... The same influence that drove the brains, experience, and ability out of Russia is busily engaged in raising prejudice here."

"The reason why Bolshevism did not work, and cannot work, is not economic. It does not matter whether industry is privately managed or socially controlled; it does not matter whether you call the workers’ share “wages” or “dividends”; it does not matter whether you regimentalize the people as to food, clothing, and shelter, or whether you allow them to eat, dress, and live as they like. Those are mere matters of detail. The incapacity of the Bolshevist leaders is indicated by the fuss they made over such details. Bolshevism failed because it was both unnatural and immoral."

Shortly afterwards is his philosophy:

There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal. Most certainly all men are not equal, and any democratic conception which strives to make men equal is only an effort to block progress. ... It is the larger men who give the leadership to the community and enable the smaller men to live with less effort."

He believed him to be one of those larger men, and his methods the way to get smaller men to live with less effort. Which included being able buy his cars.

That's not communism, that's the utopian paternalism of American technocracy.