this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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"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
I'm from the Global South, and the only Western leftists and "lefties" are from Fediverse. But this still holds true for the wannabe whites.
In my experience, a lot of Maoists I have met in the west are "wannabe 3rd worldists" and wish they weren't white and were living in a developing nation waging some vague guerilla campaign against that country's government. But they can't do that to their own government because
. In my neck of the woods they are just as impotent and insufferable as the Trots and functionally identical in their unintentional support for western imperialism(because they oppose every AES and anti-imperialist nation for not being communist enough for them).
It is funny how these deviationists like to pretend what they arent.
I don't think they truly realise what they are, functionally, they're still idealistic liberals in a red coat of paint, but as far as they are concerned they are leftists doing leftism the only correct way, which I think is why they attack other leftist tendencies so much, it's the same reason liberals attack leftists so much. Their worldview cannot handle the idea that they could be wrong, so their only solution is to attack the people who can actually prove that they are wrong, so they don't have to worry about that possibility.
Something people forget about is figures like Lenin, Mao, Che, Stalin. People like Inessa Fyodorovna Armand. These people chose the path of severe hardships.
They didn't just lead the people, they sometimes begged for survival themselves, Gramsci was born with severe disabilities and literally spent most of his life writing in a prison, Stalin went in and out of work camp several times. Lenin was shaving his beard and coming up with fake identities to hide himself as people were out for his head, Armand overworked herself to death.
You don't need to look so far back in history. Do you know about Huang Wenxiu? I'm assuming on Hexbear some people would, but people like her seem to be almost completely out of Western leftist consciousness. Because these kinds of organization efforts are illegal. It's illegal to do mass organizing for actually helping people, at best it's anarchism which operates so disjointly by the time they build 1 hospital bed a - political party could have built 1 whole hospital with trained staff.