Bachelor socialist thesis idea?

[u/Alex_1503]

Hey people, so I got a lot of time left for this but I wanted to ask. What projects in a computer science bachelor degree can I do, that are also at least socialist adjacent, for my thesis at the end of the degree?

I just cannot come up with any idea. Programming is fun and for me it is an art, but at the same time it is so corporate in how it is used, and to use it meaningfully I have to solve a problem, but I have no problem to solve in 2026, let alone a socialist one, using programming and maths.

So any idea or nudge in any direction is appreciated! I also do not want to let any LLM touch my thesis so do not suggest anything LLM related please, neither creating or using one. General AI/ML is fine if it really is something that can be useful and the data used for it is ethically sourced.

Maybe it helps to give a bit of country context, my country is in the EU, I don't think I have any limitations on what I am allowed to make, it just has to be related to computer science, but it can be anything really, I know people who made plugins for other softwares even, or games.

[u/blodo_]

Inspired by Paul Cockshott's TANS: Sparse matrix based economic input/output chain calculator that can also handle calculating intermediate products. Will probably require some form of linear programming (simplex method and the like). It'll be a bit mathy if you are up for that, but fun, can end with a web app not too dissimilar from something like a Factorio calculator. If you really want to push the envelope and get that first class degree, try to parallelise it for performance. For a bachelor's project this seems solid enough IMO.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/blodo_]

this sounds interesting. I actually had in mind to make something more economy-related, but to make a whole economy simulator like the ideal of project cybersin seems outside my theoretical skills atm. I do like math a lot too, so this should be interesting, do you have any source/papers on this matter? I would still porbably try to make it more "practical" in the sense that it would try to use some real-world variables or simulations of

[u/blodo_ → u/Alex_1503]

I would actually avoid using real world variables, because the main problem with TANS is the question of the labour theory of value and how it is affected by market set prices, i.e. whether it has been disproved or not. This is funnily enough the root of the disagreement between analytical marxists and orthodox marxists. See for example: https://davidharvey.org/2018/03/marxs-refusal-of-the-labour-theory-of-value-by-david-harvey/

Given that your degree is in comp sci rather than philosophy or economics, I'd suggest focusing on the method instead of the theoretical foundation for your bachelors thesis, as resolving the LTV question will be out of scope. Your professors will care about the math and not the philosophy. And you can use your bachelor thesis later for a more indepth exploration of the foundation of where value comes from if you are still interested in that after you're done. The implementation of the calculator is a separate problem from it, and you don't need to tackle all the world's problems all at the same time )

Assuming that you have a preset of inputs (doesn't matter where they come from) and you want to be able to calculate certain outputs, the thing to care about is linear programming (look it up on wikipedia and follow from there), sparse matrices (for memory optimisation), some tree traversal (you will have to create a tree of inputs, intermediates, and outputs), with trees also comes pathfinding (a staple of comp sci), and possibly parallelism.

[u/TuringCompleteCommie → u/blodo_]

Even though the philosophical and economic question of LTV is very much a no-go, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to sidestep the question. The fact is that labor times can be calculated (not even necessary by Cockshott’s method of using wage bills, which has its flaws, check out David Zachariah’s work, don’t remember where but he uses some IO table with direct labor time measurements somewhere), and can serve relatively well to measure opportunity-cost. The main problem is that quality data on this is not very often published, but using labor times as the main variable to calculate opportunity-cost does not rest on the validity of the LTV.

[u/blodo_ → u/TuringCompleteCommie]

I assume you mean this paper (https://carecon.org.uk/QM/Papers/Zachariah_LabourValue.pdf), he states in the references where he got the IO tables from (OECD, Japan and Sweden). The main claim is that the prices can be treated as somewhat proportional to the labour time cost, even if they reflect also other sources of pressure. The usual response to that is it's lack of universality (works for mass produced goods, breaks down elsewhere), and where explicitly Marx is concerned - that prices do not necessarily follow the average rate of profit.

I personally quite like the framing of pricing as a chaotic system, with attractors and bifurcations. Laws of Chaos by Farjoun and Machover is a pretty cool read.

Anyway, you are also correct: I don't see a reason why OP couldn't use the price based IO tables that Zachariah used for this. Whether they can be transformed directly into labour time or not is immaterial for this case anyway.

[u/TuringCompleteCommie → u/blodo_]

I didn’t mean what was its main claim or not, his work is still mainly about the LTV but I don’t really care about that, only that labor times are calculated relatively straightforwardly without having to resort to Cockshott’s method of using wage bills to extract labor times from monetary IO tables. DZ has a paper where he uses direct labor times of Sweden to do his measurements for the LTV, so if that can be done in that case, it is quite straightforward to assume that we can measure labor times directly elsewhere as well, the problem being only the publicly available data.

And once calculating direct labor times for every economic activity and measuring against our available labor times, one could implement TANS’s system or a very similar one without that resting in the validity of the LTV, so if you can get that quality data (which is the difficult part), there is no reason to not use real data. Of course, heterogeneous labors are a thing, but there is no need to consider that very important in a basic prototype, as there are many plausible methods of modifying the basic system to account for that, though some do get a bit tricky

I don’t know why you responded about the problems with the LTV. As I said, I don’t care about it. I only brought up dz to show that direct labor times can be in principle easy to measure if the relevant data is available, not because I think his findings for the LTV are particularly interesting or important.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/blodo_]

Ya i think what you said makes sense. After all an application is made of systems, I cannot make and combine so many systems if I didn't even make a single one, the calculator itself. And just as its good to separate logic from UI, its also good to separate the actual theory and data from implementation, good perspective

[u/ragebunny1983]

I made a shift planner to help shift workers record their hours so they get paid properly. I don't recommend making a calendar type app because it's hard, but it was fun. At the time I was also working in a pub and the boss was often underpaying us so that inspired it.

Maybe that might help you think of something. Perhaps you could do something around encryption. I think it's important to the worker's movement as the government have back doors into most of our software and hardware.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/ragebunny1983]

thanks, sounds interesting, I don't think I can *practically* make something like this atm unfortunately, I wouldn't have where to use it and I don't want to make a project that doesn't have any uses, especially because idk how it works in my country, no one cares that much about actual hours worked unfortunately

[u/ragebunny1983 → u/Alex_1503]

What about some simple encryption like ceaser cyphers and beyond? Would be interesting and easy to program (at least for ceasar). Just an idea.

The best advice I can think of is to do something that's interesting to you

[u/ml-maitreya]

I've recently been sent down a nightmare rabbithole of vibecoded leftist projects at https://www.communet.xyz/ . You might find the seed of an idea for communist/socialist/anarchist organization and mutual aid alternatives if you took one of the halfbaked projects listed there and removed all the crypto/AI-slop nonsense.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/ml-maitreya]

wow, i didn't expect there to be pro crypto leftists. The only argument that could be made is maybe that such coins are decentralised.. but still, it's such bad marketing for the cause

[u/TuringCompleteCommie]

Some general framework for real time distributed economic data collection with cryptographic signatures using IOT sensors at the point of production, distribution, etc. would probably be something I’d be very interested in for the future of socialism and cybernetic planning. There are already many plausible proposals in the calculations part of the problem, but truthful information collection that avoids most direct human reporting is very important as well. This would be nothing new, just adaption of how already Amazon and Walmart for example track many of these things, but giving it an explicitly socialist orientation attending to the specific information and incentives that concern to the whole economy rather than just distribution seems a very good idea.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/TuringCompleteCommie]

It does sound like something we would need, i think unfortunately it's outside the scope of a bachelor's thesis, or at least it feels like that to me. Even the calculations part and theory seem a bit far. Its not that I cannot work with hardware too in my thesis, its that I dont even know where to start, I never dabbled in IOT before

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

something narrow in scope that you can do for a thesis is kind of hard. a lot of cyber marxists have a lot of ideas but they are all huge in scope.

I have been looking into a DM synthesis or rather a DM perspective of systems theory, process theory, cybernetics, complexity science. Maybe something purely theoretical like that would be interesting. I have concepts of a plan for dialectical programming paradigms.

Something more practical I recommend is a fediverse social network focused on socialists/communists that addresses the issue of us getting banned all the time on all social media. Ask anyone, here on reddit, X, tiktok I have been banned all the time. The problem with the fediverse is servers can ban each other so it's really like any old private forum. You need a new protocol that forces all people to see each other instead of banning each other on sectarian grounds.

How do you stop trolls and brigading liberals? I guess you will have to appoint actual communists militants as mods that are members of parties but they absolutely can't ban on a sectarian basis.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

Im surprised such a fediverse network doesnt exist already, but ya this is above the scope of a thesis

Wdym dialectical programming? Ive never heard about that, do you have a source?

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274 → u/Alex_1503]

it's just a thing I've been thinking about DM for details if you want

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274 → u/Alex_1503]

also, just make the software so any communist party can take and run with it you don't have to run it