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If I remember correctly, Ken MacLeod's great sci-fi novel The Star Fraction features a computer program that's constantly analyzing various data streams (including, I think, the level of struggle) in order to determine when it's the exact right time to stage a revolution. Kinda fun.

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Thanks for starting this thread, Jasper. I am the comrade who wrote with the class struggle simulation questions.

I'm working on a computer simulation inspired by Lukács’ idea, “Class struggle is not just a battle waged against an external enemy, the bourgeoisie; it is equally the struggle of the proletariat against itself: against the devastating and degrading effects of the capitalist system on its class consciousness” (HCC).

It’s very rudimentary. I am new to computer simulation and it would probably be easier to start with a simpler problem of two enemies that are external to each other. This begs the question, how many communist computer simulation nerds exist? And what has already been done that is akin to this?

There’s a simple model of rebellion coded for the free program, Netlogo, here:

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Rebellion

I altered that "Rebellion" model so that unrest can spread, government legitimacy can collapse, and all police activity can cease -- they all "die," technically. I’m in the process of altering it further so that anyone can act like a cop. A "slider" can be created where you can play around with the probability of that happening due to various events. That may be as close as I'll get to modeling the "struggle of the proletariat against itself" component of class struggle, in this iteration anyway.

It's not great, but a first approximation. The behavior varies enough, it's not entirely deterministic and uninteresting. If anyone wants to see it, I can share the code and you can run it in the Netlogo program. I’m trying to throw something together in the two days on this, for a project for a class. Beyond that, I think this could potentially be cool – eventually, if enough more-realistic mechanisms are added – for illuminating problems in how we think about these sorts of processes.

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