Let us divorce at least the name of a singular man from a body of work

If we had a collection of competing working applications of communism, that would be easier. But trying to divorce it from Marx is a bit like trying to divorce capitalism from Adam Smith or the more modern Anarcho-Capitalist attitude from Rothbard and Rand. Like talking about Protestantism without mentioning Martin Luther.

Show me a fully realized anarchist state and we might be able to talk about Peter Kropotkin or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. But anarchists from Republican Spain to the Bodo League of Korea to American Native Tribes were wiped out by fascist militarism.

You could draw sharper lines between Leninism, Maoism, and Chauvism, but you'd still start from their common Marxist heritage.

The reductions of bodies of political thought to singular authors is often used to exclude others.

They're influential for a reason.

I am told that I am not a Socialist because I am not a Marxist

I mean, you can call yourself whatever you want. But I see the term "Socialist" pitched around to describe everything from corporate liberalism to primativist anarchism. If you want to talk about AES states, you're talking about countries that rooted themselves in Marxist philosophy.

If you said you were a Maoist or a Leninist or a Chavezist would I not conclude that you are in agreement with their very specific realms of their personal philosophy?

If I said I was a Maoist, I just didn't agree with anything in Mao's Little Red Book, I would not blame you for calling me a bullshitter.