Journey to the West --- E = mac^2

You have been warned of the obvious Austrian School bias hereafter.


1. Marx's communism: The original ideas of a utopian society where there would be no property, no state, no laws, all institutions are abolished*. People are expected to work out of sheer joy of working, yet enjoying from such an abundance of materials that one can take "according to his need". Conflicts cannot happen because the causes of conflicts, private property and classes, have been abolished. Social institutions, which served to impose no more than bourgeoise wants (they cause or suppress, rather than resolve conflicts), become unnecessary.


2. Marx's socialism: Described in Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx conjectured an intermediate step between capitalist society to the utopian communism. The prescribed implementation of such a society included a state machine operated by the newly liberated working class ("dictatorship of the proletariat"), in addition to confiscation of private property and state funded expansion of industry and agriculture. Much of these were carried out in the early days of Stalinist states.


3. Stalinism: The most vile version of all ideologies claimed association with socialism. The state not only exists, but acts as provider of all necessities of life as it owns all properties. Such power over people allowed the state to become a totalitarian nightmare, the opposite of Marx's utopia. Maoism and Jucheism are variants of this ideology. Leninism is considered the antecedent of Stalinism. All these variants have been called socialism because of the association with #2, which led to the first meaning of "socialism" that is closely related to absolute state property and Stalinist communism.

Compared with #2, both claimed to be a transitional phase. The difference was that Marx predicted a vast improvement of productive forces, as workers are liberated and can now work out of joy, which supposedly would result in an abundance of materials to such an extend that a state would not be needed to distribute the fruits of labour. The improvement did indeed happen, but not to the magnitude necessary for the anarchist communism as Marx envisioned. The economies of Stalinist states eventually stagnated, rendering the transition impossible.


4. Prague Spring, Goulash Communism, Reform and opening up, Doi Moi: These were various efforts by Stalinist countries to introduce market elements into their economies, of which China's was most noticeably successful. Although having been variously branded as socialism or communism, the emphasis of these ideologies was their capitalistic deviation from Stalinism, as opposed to any socialist roots.


5. American Liberalism and European Social Democracy: These encompass various central-left theories, which accept market's value in economic development, and respect personal liberty, including property rights. The leftness of these ideologies lies in the argument that the market still has deficiencies, which may leave the disadvantaged too much so that they would not enjoy a fair chance at life. The state was thus needed to supplement the market, and in some cases, supplant parts of it. Almost all debates in Western politics are about what nuanced degrees of such supplement are appropriate. Classical communism and Stalinism were much more extreme in that they sought to replace or abolish the entire market, rather than limited parts such as healthcare or banking. "Socialism" in this context is radically different from #2 or #3, even if they share the same egalitarian roots. Indeed, Marx himself devoted a great deal of efforts to argue against what we call progressivism today, denouncing it as "work[ing] for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow."


6. Trotskism: My patchy understanding was that the difference with Stalinism was more on how to establish communist states. Trotsky argued that true communist revolution can only be achieved if it happened in all corners of the world, whereas Stalin argued that communism can be achieved in Soviet Union first, then be spreaded to other countries. As for his plans after establishing world-wide communism, I know too little to say, but I doubt he could have run a government much differently from Stalin.


7. Mikhail Bakunin and Noam Chomsky: I'm similarly unfamiliar with their ideas. If I'm not terribly mistaken, they inherited the anarchy utopia part of Marx, but not the intermediate "dictatorship of the proletariat" part, whereas Stalin implemented the latter and went horribly wrong. I also believe instead of relying on abundance to remove all conflicts, they argued that true democratic procedures are sufficient to resolve them.

Here:

Q: What is an American University?
A: This is a strange place where Russian professors teach Chinese students in English.

So I've been working on this hobby project for a while. Basically it's a Windows Minesweeper clone, except that it has more options and comes with an automatic solver. The goal is to have more than one mines in a square (idea stolen from Super Minesweeper). The one-mine version is already finished. It's pretty stable now and looks pretty nice.

I have uploaded it to sourceforge.net, here's the link.