I agree that "capturing the means of production" is a red herring. The idea is to abolish private property, i.e. private ownership of "the means of production".
Arguably a reform stating something along the lines like, say, "non-publicly traded corporations above $1MM annual revenue for three years or employing at least 20 people must transfer ownership to a worker's council all employees automatically are members of for the duration of their employment" (this could be extended to take into consideration repayment of the initial investments of the founders as for any other loan) and similarly limiting publicly traded corporations while also offering government grants for founding employee-owned corporations (before hitting the revenue or employment cap) would pretty much tick that checkbox and I don't think that would really be "communism" in a meaningful way, even if I think it's an overall improvement for society.
I see communism as equivalent with anarchism so my definition isn't shared by all "communists" but the point isn't to "give power to the people" but to abolish the systems which give individuals power over other. That includes a lot of "SJW"/"woke" topics like white supremacism, cis-heteronormativity, ageism/gerontocracy (i.e. treating children as lesser beings rather than persons with intellectual and physical limitations), ableism (i.e. treating people with intellectual and physical limitations as lesser beings) and "the patriarchy", as well as capitalism. That's quite the laundry list so I'm fine with incrementalism.
Of course some communists like Engels conflate(d) hierarchy with the vague nation of "authority" to create a strawman against this notion of communism, i.e. that anarchists not wanting individuals to have power over others means they can't do violence in order to help bring about communism or defend it -- which of course is nonsensical because opposing systems of power does not contradict using power (i.e. violence) in opposition of those systems. There are other ideological disagreements too but it boils down to anarchism being "communism but more so" and Marxist-Leninists being of the opinion that that is worse and that therefore not being able to achieve that with their means (e.g. vanguardism) is not an issue.
Arguably a reform stating something along the lines like, say, "non-publicly traded corporations above $1MM annual revenue for three years or employing at least 20 people must transfer ownership to a worker's council all employees automatically are members of for the duration of their employment" (this could be extended to take into consideration repayment of the initial investments of the founders as for any other loan) and similarly limiting publicly traded corporations while also offering government grants for founding employee-owned corporations (before hitting the revenue or employment cap) would pretty much tick that checkbox and I don't think that would really be "communism" in a meaningful way, even if I think it's an overall improvement for society.
I see communism as equivalent with anarchism so my definition isn't shared by all "communists" but the point isn't to "give power to the people" but to abolish the systems which give individuals power over other. That includes a lot of "SJW"/"woke" topics like white supremacism, cis-heteronormativity, ageism/gerontocracy (i.e. treating children as lesser beings rather than persons with intellectual and physical limitations), ableism (i.e. treating people with intellectual and physical limitations as lesser beings) and "the patriarchy", as well as capitalism. That's quite the laundry list so I'm fine with incrementalism.
Of course some communists like Engels conflate(d) hierarchy with the vague nation of "authority" to create a strawman against this notion of communism, i.e. that anarchists not wanting individuals to have power over others means they can't do violence in order to help bring about communism or defend it -- which of course is nonsensical because opposing systems of power does not contradict using power (i.e. violence) in opposition of those systems. There are other ideological disagreements too but it boils down to anarchism being "communism but more so" and Marxist-Leninists being of the opinion that that is worse and that therefore not being able to achieve that with their means (e.g. vanguardism) is not an issue.