Actually, there is a massive difference between Large 'C" Communism and small "c" communism. To be a "Large 'C' Communist" is to be an unquestioning defender of everything any Communist state did after 1917, and especially after 1924. To be a "small 'c' communist"- in some ways Christ's teachings could be considered, in what they said about wealth and excessive acquisition of possessions while in this world could be called "small 'c' communism", especially the "the meek shall inherit the Earth" line from the Sermon on the Mount-simply means to support sharing the wealth of this world, the wealth working people create with our labor and could easily create without anyone who wants to get rich being involved, and to share the decisions about what is done with that wealth and things like whether we should or should not get into wars. That is all "small 'c' communism" means- and I doubt we'll get to that anytime near your or my lifetime, though you'd probably be happier and calmer in such a world if it ever did appear.
(btw, I'm not either sort of a communist. I am somewhere between a democratic socialist and an anarcho-syndicalist- the two branches of the Left that are most deeply opposed to authoritarianism- neither of these traditions defended or supported the Soviet Union after 1921, when the Krondstadt Rising- a rebellion by soldiers and sailors of the Red Army garrison at Krondstadt, a military island just off the coast from what is once again called "St. Petersberg", which fought for the restoration of workers' control of the factories and for the restoration of the democratic and autonomous decision-making powers of the local soviets(workers and servicemembers' councils which were meant to function as something like the revolutionary version of New England town meetings) was crushed by Lenin and Trotsky, thus guaranteeing that the USSR would be doomed to degenerate into a right-wing bureaucratic dictatorship in which workers were powerless.
What you don't seem to understand is that essentially everyone on today's Left despises what the Soviet Union became under Stalin or China degenerated into as a result or Mao's paranoia- and that the organizing principle of the Left today is to learn from the problems in the creation of those disgusting and ultimately reactionary states and in learning from that to avoid replicating them. People on the Left I'm talking about feel absolute disdain and contempt for the tiny, irrelevant, delusional handful of individuals who still defend the essentially extinct Marxist-Leninist tradition and its actions. The Left of today calls such people "tankies", because they defend such things as the Red Army's use of brute force, and tendency to roll their tanks through the streets shooting at innocent people, to put down attempts at creating non-repressive and more genuinely socialist alternatives to Marxism-Leninism in places like East Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968- the brutal incursions against free speech and the end of the dictatorial decision-making structures that were never necessary to build socialism or any sort, and which ended up being the cause of the massive popular uprisings against the Stalinist dinosaur states that Gorbachev allowed to prevail in 1989 by refusing to send the Red Army in to suppress.
To be on the Left today is to utterly, categorically and permanently reject any of the antidemocratic, antisocialist choices Lenin, Stalin & Mao made-choices that are the reason the perversions of socialism they supported are now extinct as political possibilities anywhere.
Stalinism died. Maoism died. Neither of their deaths was the death of the natural human desire for equality, freedom from want-a freedom without which no other freedom can truly exist- peace, and justice.
You have no reason to accuse today's Left of wanting what it utterly rejects.
