ABSTRACT
There is an old Leninist adage, invented by Lenin himself of course, that if the revolution supplies enough rope to the bourgeois class, it will manage to hang itself. The latest craze for this approach stimulated by the noble purpose of spreading the world of knowledge to all at the lowest or no cost goes under the banner of "open access". The disastrous history of newspaper and magazine publishing in the first decade of the twenty-first century seemingly made no impression on the barons of the printed word. The socialist character of this manifesto is hardly restrained and to the credit of its library sponsors, not disguised. There is little patience with the idea of proprietary considerations, differences of opinion as expressed through the marketplace of ideas, and none whatsoever to how such a manifesto is to be brought into play without cost, pain or preference.
