The March 13 CHALLENGE article, “War on Terror: Mass Red Movement Can Defeat Rulers’ High-Tech Tyranny”, was a wake-up call for many of us.  The article discussed the various technologies that have emerged at an accelerated rate for surveillance and spying since the Arab Spring.  There are conferences all over the world debating and attacking the growth of fascist technology to monitor and control citizens.
The bosses are using terrorist attacks since 9/11 as an excuse to tighten the screws on all workers and monitor them more closely as a means of social control.  In addition to monitoring cell phones to track workers’ location and activities, the internet increasingly cannot be accessed without proper institutional affiliation (or money).  The bosses control workers’ access to information to make it harder for workers to educate themselves. 
Many progressive workers have tried to fight back against the establishment by promoting free access to educational materials on the internet.  Those who have rebelled have been punished severely. Aaron Swartz, a talented programmer social/activist, committed suicide at the age of 26 last January 1.  He had been arrested two years earlier for allegedly hacking the servers at the Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT) to download millions of on-line library files of academic journals. 
In the case United States v. Aaron Swartz, he was facing up to 35 years of jail time and was overwhelmed by despair.  He had the education to understand the need to fight back and revolt against the status quo, but he lacked the discipline and support of a collective so he gave in to the intimidation and bullying of the (il)legal system that serves the capitalist system.
Although his death was actually a suicide, and Aaron’s family acknowledged that he was a troubled person, his father released a statement saying, “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy.  It is the product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.  Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office and at MIT contributed to his death.”
Although we cannot consider Aaron to be a member of the working class, as he was a millionaire by 19 and came from a liberal and elite family.  However, he had a very close friendship with Quinn Norton, a tech journalist with working-class roots.  Today, Aaron, Quinn and many other young people understand that corporations and the government pervert and distort technology and the internet to serve their own profit-making interests. We in PL need to work harder to seek out and engage rebellious youth, to expose them to our ideas and struggle with them to see that only with the destruction of capitalism can information be made “free” for workers and youth.
Although Swartz was right to fight against the bosses, many like him are isolated and acting alone, making it much easier for the rulers to destroy Swartz and others who act without a collective like PLP. 
What can we learn from this tragedy?  If we could have more PL’ers in technology to bring our revolutionary ideas — with the focus on the fight for a new egalitarian communist society — Aaron might not have succumbed to extreme individualism and taken his own life in one destructive self-centered act.  Communism could have given him the discipline, focus, and mission to continue on in his work to fight for a better world.
Red hacker