What is to Be Done?

[Alan Sondheim]

[from don't know to herenow relevant]



What is to Be Done?


Report: I'm alive and well in Traveller's Linux; I have left Vienna.
Report: I'm in on Vienna Traveller's Linux. I am told I am paranoid.
Communique: My name is Vladimir Lenin. I am in Edit, Austria.
Communique: Hello out there. I am cut off.
Communique: The best Jews, those who are celebrated in world history,
and have given the world foremost leaders of democracy and socialism,
have never clamoured against assimilation.
Report: I'm alive and well; there are no Jews in Traveller's Linux.
Report: The conclusion which follows from this is absolute intcontro-
vertible: it has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revo-
lutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parli-
ament, even a few weeks before the victory of a Soviet republic and
even _after_ such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to
_prove_ to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be
Communique: I am not paranoid; I have been told I am not paranoid.
Communique: I am at Row: 00017 and Column: 00048.
Report: This is coming to you from Traveller's Linux.
Communique to A. V. Lunacharsky: Aren't you ashsmed to vote for pub-
lication of Mayakovasky's _150 Millions_ in five thousand copies?
Rubbish, stupidity, double-dyed stupidity and pretentiousness. In my
opinion we should print only one out of ten such things, and _not
more than fifteen hundred copies,_ for libraries and odd people. And
flog Lunarcharsky for futurism.
Report: Hello? Radio Traveller's Linux here. I AM NOT PARANOID!
Communique: What column is this? Column 00045.
Communique: I am seventy-eight years old.
Communique: Youth's altered attitude to questions of sex is of
course 'fundamental' and based on theory. Many people call it revo-
lutionary' and 'communist.' They sincerely believe that this is so.
I am an old man and I do not like it. I may be a morose ascetic, but
quite often this so-called 'new sex life' of young people -- and fre-
quently of the adults too -- seems to me purely bourgeois and simply
an extension of the good old bourgeois brothel. All this has nothing
in common with free love as we Communists understand it.
Report: I am certainly not in favor of this or that!
Report: I do not smoke a bourgeois so-called cigarette!
Communique: The whole of society will have become a single office
and a single factory, with equality of labor and pay.
Communique: The second condition is agreement between the proletari-
at, which is exercising its dictatorship, that is, holds state power,
and the majority of the peasant population.
Report: I do not agree with those of the dictatorship who accuse me
of paranoia, although I have been committed of paranoia by the so-
called 'state authorities.' I do not smoke a cigarette, a victim of
the bourgeois mind!
Communique: I am in Traveller's Linux! I am in the root directory!
No one else is here beside me! No one else is toppling this machine
constructed of the finest materials! I am using this machine! This
will have been Column 15! This will have been Row 50! I am in Aus-
tria, but I am not in Vienna! I have never been in Vienna! This is a
hope of bourgeois freedom!
Report: The government of the proletarian dictatorship -- jointly
with the Communist Party and the trade unions of course -- makes ev-
ery effort to overcome the backward views of men and women and thus
uproot the old, non-commmunist psychology. It goes without saying
that men and women are absolutely equal before the law.
Communique: My name is Vladimir Lenin. You had the rudness to call
my wife on the telephone and berate her.
Report: It sounds just as though he were chewing rags in his sleep!
Report: One cannot hide the fact that dictatorship presupposes and
implies a "condition," one so disagreeable to renegades, of _revolu-
tionary violence_ of one class against another.
Report: We must see to it that every factory and every electric pow-
er station becomes a centre of enlightenment; if Russia is covered
with a dense network of electric power stations and powerful techni-
cal installations, our communist economic development will become a
model for a future socialist Europe and Asia.
Communique: I am on previous Row 69 of this Report and Communique.
Communique: I am not paranoid -- only to approach the government of
the revolutionary proletarian dictatorship, is it not within the
purview of any sane man to wonder at the absence of individuals
within this dense network, given the absence, in other words, of any
other within Traveller's Linux? This is the Communique of Vladimir
Lenin, having been declared paranoid by the state.
Report: This ends toe Communique of Vladimir Lenin, having been de-
clared paranoid by the state.
Communique: I have been declared paranoid by the state.

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