I’ve never thought too much about identifying as one “branch” of Marxism, but now that I think about it I can’t really come up with a simple explanation of the main divergences between different currents (ML vs MLM for instance). I suppose I agree more with Marxist-Leninist thought but besides some obvious ones like Trotskyists and patsocs I can only come up with extremely specific details of those divergences (mainly over critical support for AES).
And I definitely can’t describe disagreements of less common discussions such as Xi Jinping thought and “Fidel Castro thought”.
It doesn’t help that a lot of the discussion centers around people like Wisconcom who aren’t exactly the height of ideological consistency.
So can anybody help out?
Tendencies are not exhaustive lists of policy positions. They are identities, or “Cliques”. Someone who calls themselves “Just a Marxist” might have the exact same sets of beliefs as an “Anarcho-Hoxhaist” and neither one is necessarily wrong, in much the same way as people with the same objective gender experience might identify as “Effeminate Man” or “Nonbinary Trans Demigirl”.
Maoists tend to not like modern China (it’s “revisionist”) or the post-Lenin/Stalin USSR but are otherwise model revolutionary Socialists, usually. Trotskyites are a mix of Stalin-skeptic Marxists (reasonable, even if I don’t agree) and “Democratic Socialists” (i.e., anti-Revolutionary Socialists) who just really like Trotsky for some reason.
If anything ends with “Thought”, it just means “I like the cut of this guy’s jib!”.