askchapo

"Maoism" is about as real as "Dengism" is. There are people that called themselves Maoists and thought functionaries driving a minimum number of mercedes cars by year x was integral to their party's growthy. In the 60-80ies it was the same as "Daddy Xi pls send nukes" - an edgy marker of being a cool kid in the in-group that didnt necessarily tell a lot about the person's committment.

Identifying with people perceived to be critical of the USSR (at vastly different points... Mao liked Stalin) is sometimes a crutch for people self-conscious about communism and the objective need to do nasty shit to reactionaries which itself is kinda telling on how seriously you gotta take these people. That being said, the need for labels is kind of a sign of insecurity and need for identity labels as a shibboleth is generally a big tell on ideological insecurities as well. and inner-leftist handing out of labels, like calling everybody that disagrees with a voluntarist call to action an ultra is more name-calling and appeals to the room's Common Sense imo. I think. Sorry for the messy train of thought - on mobile.

TL;DR: you will know a real "maoist" when you interact with them, usually it's western leftist with hangups about needing to have show trials for every NYT editor

To answer your question more seriously, a lot of these people are part of the "compatible left" or "captured left" people who claim to be left wing, but ultimately do not support any real socialist causes and do not do anything significant to oppose capital.

They are more noticable in the west because they are often allowed to exist where successful left wing orgs would be suppressed, so people looking to join an org will end up joining these do-nothing "weekend socialist" types. The actual leftist tendency is irrelevant, they are all the same, a group of people who claim to have the One True Correct Path of Leftism and spend all their time and energy attacking other leftists for disagreeing with them rather than actually doing anything to oppose capital.

They are functionally a way for the governments of the west to funnel revolutionary energy into impotency that is no longer a threat to capital. Trotskyism and Maoism are just two of the more common masks they use to disguise their true function, because those are ways to enable people to keep their liberal brainworms about AES being "bad" while also feeling like they are opposing capitalism, which is why you don't really see orgs like this being more traditional Marxist Leninists, because that also means they would approve of Stalin and the USSR (and possibly all other AES as well) and would make for bad controlled opposition that way.

I don't think trots and maoists are that comparable. First of all, see how many trots tend to hate Mao for being himself a "Stalinist" in their estimation, and also hate basically any socialist project that controlled a state except a very brief period in the USSR. I don't think that considering modern China revisionist, even if you disagree with that estimation, is on the level of ridiculous historical revisionism that trots engage in.

The egg broken from the outside is dinner, the egg broken from the inside is new life.

The f-you, got mine of socialism.