Popular consensus isn't a good way to decide if something is what it is called. By your logic, evolution isn't what science has shown, but what people think it is.
Seriously, you just said, "Even though this country does almost everything the opposite way of Communism, it still is Communist because people say so".
If you want to get very, very technical all "communism" is is a series of sounds produced by the human mouth and vocal chords.
The point being that first and foremost words are used by human beings to communicate so we can't just treat the way people use words as irrelevant. People need to stop trying to reclaim the word "communism". Sorry it's been tainted by being historically associated with the Soviet Union and is not ever going to mean what it used to mean. Most people I run into defending "communism"(as they put it) and saying the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba,... aren't/weren't really communist could describe their political views better within the modern day social context as "social democratic" or "democratic socialist", and none of the meaning pertaining to what they are trying to say about their political views would be lost.
It's the overall concept that is supposed to be expressed by the word that is important though. That people get confused about the little details (such as people who say things like "if evolution is true why are there still monkeys) does not change what the word means. It's the overall way a word is conceptualized that matters.
Vietnam is "communist" because the ruling "Communist Party" still justifies its actions (to its people and I assume, to itself since typically elites are just as brainwashed as the masses) based on the ideal that it is a vanguard party leading its people towards the goal of "communism"(a hypothetical stateless and classless society) through the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which has come to mean a vanguard that thinks it is ruling in the interests of the proletariat whether it works out that way or not. Even the market reforms are justified with plenty of mental gymnastics as a step on the way to "communism".
The other branch of Marxism which was christened "social democracy" could be said to be a continuation more of what Marx meant by "dictatorship of the proletariat", although it has largely abandoned the pretense of ever making it to what Marx termed as the "communist" stage, although personally I do think it will happen just not in the way Marx or anyone else envisioned. When technology reaches the point where human labor becomes unnecessary the rich then has nothing to lose from abandoning its control over the means of production, and couldn't justify itself at that point even if it wanted to because nobody is working anymore in order to "earn" the right to have that control. We would set up a system probably through the internet where people would just put in what ever requests they wanted and then the worldwide computer system would order its robots to get to work building it for us as long as it wasn't too over-the-top (couldn't ask for your own personal fleet of spaceships, at least not at the production capacity we would have at first).
For now and until we can abolish human labor we need capitalism, but not the crazy, unbridled form the right preaches. The government should devote itself to pursuing policies that bring us closer to abolishing the need for human labor.
