system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What is the difference between Maoism, Communism and Socialism?
gpt
Socialism is a big bunch of different ideas and movements over the past two centuries. What they have in common is that they are all, in one way or another, about *people owning things together as a group.* But is is a really wide range of views and people and movements. Like, some of them are peaceful political parties that want the government to run the economy better; others are violent dictatorships; others are religious sects. It's like a tree with many branches, that is also entangled with other trees.

Communism is a particular big branch of socialism, originally having to do with organizing industrial workers into a single political party and taking over the government to run the economy. The ideas of Communism were put together by Marx and Engels. But the Communist *movement* split into lots of smaller movements once Communist parties actually started getting political power in places like Russia and China.

A lot of those splits weren't about disagreeing on political principles as much as they were about trusting particular movement leaders, or about taking influence from particular countries. This is a really important distinction. It's like the difference between "What should the laws be?" vs. "Who should be the sheriff?" ... or "Are we playing cops-and-robbers or are we playing sandcastles?" vs. "Are we playing the game Joe wants to play, or the game Mary wants to play?"

Maoism is a particular branch of Communism, based on the movement led by Mao Zedong that took over China. One way it's different from other Communism is that it was historically more interested in peasants than in industrial workers. Another is that the Maoist movement was very violent after it took over the government, even more so than the Bolshevik Communist movement in Russia.