Re: rage against the machine

"There is no excuse for such criminal product packaging. Anyone doing it or defending it should be burned at stake in any civilized country. The fact that it will not happen is the best statement about the times we live in." I agree. Thank you for the clarity of your writing in this thread, much

Re: more brexit spam.. sorry

“No deal can’t be taken off the table; it is the table.” You’ll hear this clever sound bite in Twitter feeds on both sides of the Brexit divide, but it suffers from the serious defect of being wrong. When we talk about no deal being the table, we mean that it is the present default position. No

Re: At last the brexit dividend

At last an oped piece from a former Leave staffer that at leas holds out the hope that one of Johnson, Gove, Davies et al will not succeed May as PM. THAT would be a true Brexit dividend. "In the end, the hard Brexiteer perfectionists bedazzled by cake and unicorns proved to be the obstacle that

Re: At last the brexit dividend

Hi David, Thanks for that thoughtful response which justifiably raises longer term issues of the British constitution than the daily news as reported in the piece just sent in. I met the US ambassador to France in the year the euro was launched as currency and he asked me if Blair would buy into

Re: At last the brexit dividend

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 12:42 PM David Garcia < d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk> wrote: > A true Democracy: All United in Ignorance- > Total fucking insanity > When asked by what is actually happening my reply has become “I know > nothing!” > There are a few people who have not abandoned

Re: From here to Brexeternity

An insane place where politics is done one day at a time – that’s Brexit Britain *Martha Gill * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/08/insane-place-politics-day-theresa-may-no-deal-brexit-britain So here we are. The government

From here to Brexeternity

*From James Blitz, Financial Times, 6th March 2019* If Theresa May’s deal is passed by the House of Commons next week, the UK will enter a new era called “Brexeternity”, says former Labour minister Denis MacShane, who in an article for the LSE website

Re: Cyberpunks who were right about everything, but so what

On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 5:52 PM Bruce Sterling wrote: > > The worst we suffer is guys on nettime imagining that we disappeared > culturally, just because we’re old. > > *Because we ARE old. It’s 2019 and us cyberpunks are white-haired people > in our sixties and seventies. > > *Or read some

Re: The stupidity of the Americans

Thanks for this.A better machine, the German DeepL translator. The review is worth it. On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 7:19 PM Morlock Elloi wrote: > [ Machine translated film review from > > https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Die-Dummheit-der-Amerikaner-4323913.html?seite=all > ] > The stupidity of the

Re: Facebook’s “toxic” global lobbying

C L R James argued from the 70s that there are only two world revolutions left -- the second Russian revolution and then the second American revolution (missing out the civil war which instituted national capitalism). We thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was the first, but it wasn't. It

Re: Facebook’s “toxic” global lobbying

The corporations already are the lawmaker of the world. In the 80s the World Bank and the IMF destroyed national governments' ability to protect their own economies(Structural adjustment policies) in order to enable the free flow of global capital. Now the capital is invested in these countries

Re: Why I have stopped reading about Brexit

Hi Patrice, You are a brave man, but also very unlucky at least in terms of timing. This evening May was defeated when the ERG decided to pull the plug for the second time. This means that her ploy of suggesting that the Tory government is in control is rubbished. The EU negotiators have even

Re: John Lichfield: Who Are the Gilets Jaunes? (Guardian)

In 2005, I was being driven by taxi across Paris. The driver could have been any of the head shots in that article -- a big young guy in a heavy jacket. Every time we stopped, he flipped over a couple of pages of a large printout. I asked him what it was. It was the EU Lisbon treaty, all 400 pages

Re: notes from Brexania in limbo...

.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org >> # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: > > > > -- > > <http://keith-hart.com/?promo=email_sig_source=product_medium=email_sig_campaign=gmail_api_content=thumb> > Keith Hart > keith-hart.com > <http://ke

Re: notes from Brexania in limbo...

@nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: -- <http://keith-hart.com/?promo=email_sig_source=product_medium=email_sig_campaign=gmail_api_content=thumb> Keith Hart keith-hart.com <http://keith-hart.com/?promo=email_sig_source=product_medium=email_sig_campaign=gmail_a

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

Dear Felix, >But to break out of the mold of neoliberal hyper-individuality and the cult of "weak ties", to formulate something like a left perspective, there needs to be a realization of a common fate, of a problem that cannot be solved individually, but demands a collective response. From this,

Re: apropos "relax dear"

Julia and Angela, Nettime was originally a club for the class of white male geeks who thought they were making a new internet in the 90s. This class, in vehicles such as unlike us, now fights a rearguard action against the FAANG monopolists. Ted and Felix at one time proposed winding up the

Re: (no subject)

>I do think that I, some self, alone, is ultimately incapable of politics, as is the endless multiplication of selfsameness< Each of us is a 'self' who belongs to all humanity. These extremes are mediated by a plethora of divisions. Individuals can't act alone n politics, but we can choose with

Re: elections in Brazil / media

his moment is really excruciating. > > best, Brian > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo

Re: elections in Brazil / media

happening > right now in Brazil is showing us all what the outcome could look like, if > more serious ideas are not able to convince the majorities. > > soberly, Brian > > On Sat, Oct 13, 2018 at 4:05 AM Keith Hart > wrote: > >> Thanks for the Current Affairs a

Re: elections in Brazil / media

Thanks for the Current Affairs article, Andre, and for your commentary, Brian. I subscribe to CA, like it and this particular article. Your post led me to share it with a friend in Rio. Here is his response: The article about Brazil is right about the dangers that we are facing. What it s not

Re: Adam Tooze: Politics don’t matter; market forces shape our world (The Observer/Guardian)

In a 1986 article, "Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin", I argued that politics and markets are both intrinsic to money. The idea that politics (Keynes) had been superseded by markets (Friedman) was bound to lead to massive errors in money management. When politics are made to disappear from

Re: What does Trump get right?

Dear Brian, >I want to stand with the youth of this country and throw every punch I can for socialism. This is a revolt I can imagine, it's the very one I and so many others have been pushing for over the last twenty years -- but the difference is, we were theory and the kids are fact…What all

Re: What does Trump get right?

Hi Brian, I never thought that your nettime posts were weird or worse-- which is why I always read them and sometimes reply, like now. The picture you draw from the NYT and your own posts of the last two decades is unassailable and it is a political crisis. The issue is to find out who the

Fwd: Shree Paradkar: When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster with the blood of millions on his hands? (Toronto Star)

I have studied Churchill for a long time, especially his part in British imperialism (Southern African branch) around 1900. Liberal governments at the launch of the last century, when facing insurgency in India Ireland and South Africa, invented most of techniques of dirty state warfare that made

Re: Shree Paradkar: When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster with the blood of millions on his hands? (Toronto Star)

here. “Many a past great … including Sir > Winston Churchill” have been members, says its website. > > This compounds the tragedy. Erasing his crimes pronounces his victims > worthless, deems their lives undeserving of acknowledgement, and leaves > their deaths but a footno

Re: I farted

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 11:53 AM, Felix Stalder wrote: > This analogy is wrong. > > The better one might be the Polish cavalry charging against German tanks > in September 1939. Impeccable in style, even scoring a micro-victory, > but no match to the forces just unleashed.

Re: Speculative Intergalactic Network

As a thought experiment, consider why we can't communicate with the ants or vice versa. Their social organization is stronger than ours and their collective intelligence is demonstrable. It may be that one side is more primitive than the other. But which? Kant held that reason is still largely

Re: So what does awakening mean to you?

On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 8:10 PM, Dan S. Wang wrote: > > > Hi Brian, > > Thank you for an inspired meditation on the film Get Out. I watched it a > few days ago. [spoilers to follow, sorry] > > The film is totally about race, but so is America, or for that matter, > Europe.

Re: So what does awakening mean to you?

tp://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: -- <http://keith-hart.com/?promo=email_sig_source=product_medium=email_sig_campaign=gmail_api_content=thumb>

Fwd: Constitutioanl radicalism

On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 12:19 PM, Felix Stalder wrote: > > I think Latour's answer (and I would largely agree with him) is that > it's precisely the individual-society divide that its problematic, > first, because neither can exists without the other and, second, because >

Re: Constitutioanl radicalism

is in Subject: <http://keith-hart.com/?promo=email_sig_source=product_medium=email_sig_campaign=gmail_api_content=thumb> Keith Hart keith-hart.com <http://keith-hart.com/?promo=email_sig_source=product_medium=email_sig_campaign=gmail_api_content=thumb> # distributed via : no commerci

Re: Managerial capitalism?

That's a lovely essay, Brian, perhaps because retrospective rather than prospective, as well as contemporary. I don't know what your attitude to publishing is these days or where it would go, but imo, taking out the personal frame, it goes as it is. It is also spot on. Burnham lives in

Re: "Too bad your great ideas never work."

lopment must be sustainable. Their poverty tells them that. They drown in the Mediterranean rather than accept the impasse they face at home. But they are the most hopeful region in the world and they have good reason to be. Keith -- <http://keith-hart.com/?promo=email_sig_source=product_medium=email_sig_

Re: When repression is cheaper than redistribution

Thanks for the interview, Walter. I am a huge fan of Adam Curtis as a documentary, but less impressed by him as a political philosopher. I prefer to get their thoughts on revolution from revolutionaries like Lenin and CLR James. The latter once told me this: The number of serious political

Re: When repression is cheaper than redistribution

>> eras. >> >> >> <> >> > > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/m

Kenya leads East Africa's march to modernity

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/01/kenyan-supreme-court-annuls-uhuru-kenyatta-election-victory For the first time in postcolonial Africa, a court has cancelled the result of a presidential election. Although West and Southern Africa, with the continental superpowers in Nigeria and

Re: Who said the US is boring?

Thanks, David. Believe it or not, I did not plagiarize your post. I missed it and what plagiarist would send his work back to the source where there are so many witnesses? The language parallels belong to the Zeitgeist, I suppose. I wanted to focus on just one point.This is not a case of a swing

Re: Who said the US is boring?

Brian, Thanks once more for your stimulating perspective on the political crisis. I have tried to boil down my take on that crisis, without yet proposing possible initiatives, which will in any case be contingent and perhaps more local than previously imagined. Market fundamentalism is at

Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture

I have lived in Pars now for two decades and in that time I have been sustained mainly by French economic sociologists and institutional economists, as well as by networks taking in Latin America, Southern and Northern Europe, Africa and South Asia. There is a dominant ideology in these circles:

Re: How Tinder helped to beat May & could win the White

That's very well put, Felix. Ephemeral networks do not by themselves launch new versions of society. We need a richer toolkit for that. In "Kinship, contract and trust", a 1988 study of the economic life of migrants in Accra, Ghana, I located trust on a continuum of belief between blind faith

Re: Can the Left Meme?

Just to return to basics for a moment, the neologism "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary or Darwinian biologist, in The Selfish Gene (1976) which came hard after E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) which was in turn heavily criticized methodologically within the

Re: merkel, macron: europe on its own

Hi Felix, Thanks for making a response to my overlong post. Environmentalism is a form of what Durkheim called "natural religion" for which Australian totemism is the archetype and about as intellectually credible (the aborigines worship society in the symbolic form of animals in particular

Re: merkel, macron: europe on its own

for peace, not predicting winners in a cultural contest of legitimacy. Keith On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 5:54 AM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 06/02/2017 03:39 AM, Keith Hart wrote: > >> It is foolish to bracket the US and Russia together, even

Re: Notes on the counter-revolution 2

Something happened to the link in transit. This to the paper: https://www.academia.edu/31962867/Notes_on_the_counter-revolution # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics

Notes on the counter-revolution 2

I came across these anecdotal scribbles recently. They were written in the context of September 11th, the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq which began while I was teaching in the US. I was led by various encounters and developments to reflect on whether American society was

Re: In Praise of Cash

Thanks for the wake-up call, Brett. It is useful to start a war between cash and bank money, if we are indeed sleepwalking into an insidious totalitarian bureaucracy. But I have found that bureaucracies look a lot more monolithic from the outside from the inside and your take on

Re: will someone explain

Why ask Americans to explain? Would you expect Romans to understand the Empire, better to ask a Greek slave. In any case, there is no better account of what makes the Americans tick than Alexis de Tocqueville's. Incidentally the French government sent him there with a mate to study the prison

Re: Protocols and Crises

Looks promising, Felix. An abstract should be abstract and this one is not confused, just sometimes elliptical, Some notes: The three types of power (hard, soft, neo-liberal) seem to be discrete categories, but don't their inter-relationships blur those boundaries? The contrast

Re: A Third Way Between Protectionism & Globalization

for the 21st century?' I wrote a chapter on Africa's prospects called 'Waiting for emancipation' - https://www.opendemocracy.net/keith-hart/waiting-for-emancipation-prospects-for-liberal-revolution-in-africa - I argued for regional trade federations as a step towards a politically stronger Africa

Fwd: What is the meaning of Trump's Victory

. <...> -- Prof. Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk 135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere 75009 Paris, France Cell: +33684797365 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the

Re: What is the meaning of Trump's victory?

This is an interesting analysis of the transition from neoliberal to whatever, Felix. You take off from Polanyi, but don't actually rely on him so much. As you will see, I think this a good thing. My post will focus more on the double movement hypothesis, Polanyi and Marx, 19th and 20th centuries.

Re: What is the meaning of Trump's victory?

I have just posted this on Facebook. It is not the sort of thing you would expect on nettime, but is meant sincerely, even if I could change my mind about a lot of it pretty quickly. You will learn more about Trump in coming months. He isn't the Mussolini (but with frightening power) that he

Re: Ethereum: DAO - "The Attacker"

That's it, Felix. I wish I had thought of putting like that. I don't think it is a recurrent and forgettable cultural trait. I comes from the historical coincidence of neoliberal economy (deregulation), the contemporary alliance with capital of techno-utopians (magical thinking) and their

Re: England leaves Europe

Hi Brian, I can't offer proof, far from it. It is a story that I have been building up for decades. No doubt its source is a Manchester man's loathing of how London stole our industrial revolution and turned it into mercantile colonial empire, wrecking the British economy in the process. This

Re: England leaves Europe

"It's about time, Brian" But time for what? The political agenda that counts in Britain now is decentralisation, the break up of the United Kingdom and of London's dominance, led by the Scots of course, but with the reunification of Ireland now a distinct possibility. There are

Re: Larry Elliott: Europe's liberal illusions shatter as

It is true that the euro is a Greek trgedy in both the ancient and modern senses. Elliot and Atkinson refer only the contemporary screw-up and all� the terrible stuff done to and by Greeks today. But this superficial journalism. The concept of hamartia refers to errors that people

Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch

Hi Felix, I agree with your analysis completely. The European problem is democracy not money. But where is the democratic push going to come from? I am a europhile, I have lived in Paris for almost two decades. In recent years I have begun to see that I may have backed the wrong horse. In 1900

Re: nettime nottime: the end of nettime

and past -- ... -- Prof. Keith Hart [15]www.thememorybank.co.uk 135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere 75009 Paris, France Cell: +33684797365 References 1. mailto:nett...@kein.org 2. http://in-berlin.de/ 3. http://desk.nl/ 4. http://material.net/ 5. http://thing.net

Re: nettime 'fuck europe!' then what?

In 1900 Europe contained 25% of the world's population, in 2100 it is forecast o be 6%. Europe is the main and permanent loser in this world crisis. Talk of reversion to the nation-state is just one symptom of that.

Re: nettime Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of Highbrow Journalism

Hi Ted, Thanks for the best contribution to this thread. I am sure you are right to emphasise the contradiction between scholasticism and reaching a broader public. I am convinced that a lot of it was envy of Morozov's public reach and I too wonder if his apparently perverse career move into the

Re: nettime Post-Postism,

something, not just that We're over that, because I'm over being over things. Patrick. -- Prof. Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk 135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere 75009 Paris, France Cell: +33684797365 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime

Re: nettime Ippolita Collective: In the Facebook Aquarium (part

Thanks, Florian. The synthesis of the liberal and anti-liberal strands of modern thinking offered by Horkheimer and Adorno is something we should aspire to renew in our own way. The non-dialectical fashion to dump the Enlightenment as a Western capitalist conspiracy is lazy. Reconciling Kant,

Re: nettime The secret financial market only robots can see

turned out to be very silly. -- Prof. Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk 135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere 75009 Paris, France Cell: +33684797365 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text

Re: nettime David Graeber: The modern phenomenon of nonsense jobs

How is this related to the collapse of middle class employment argument? J S Mill once described colonialism as make-work for the middle classes and Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right (1821), saw the limits to capitalism exporting poverty and unemployment through colonial empire. Now it has come

nettime a liberal revolution in 21st century Africa?

. PPS Suggestions, public or prviate, much welcomed. -- Prof. Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk 135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere 75009 Paris, France Cell: +33684797365 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism

Re: nettime dark days

I don't know why what Daniel Ellsberg described as the most significant leak ever should lead you to despair. European governments are challenging the Obama administration, the response within the US will be heavier. The campaign to loosen the grip of the Silicon Valley internet monpolists is

Re: nettime #occupyGezi

Is this of any use, Felix? http://www.opendemocracy.net/ali-gokpinar/neither-turkish-spring-nor-velvet-revolution K On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 10:41 AM, Felix Stalder fe...@openflows.com wrote: Like many people, I've been following the news re: #occupyGezi, but I still feel I don't really

Re: nettime Facebook's perfec spam laboratory.

I wish I had your talent and time for kindness, Ed. Felix has admitted that his initial post was sloppy, so he won't take offence, I hope, if I report that, when I saw it, my heart sank. I decided to leave it alone. The freedom to ignore messages is more commonplace than Facebook's detractors

nettime Nobel laureate in economics aged 102 endorses the human economy approach

*Thanks for the idea*, Mark. Nettimers can check out the human economy program at http://web.up.ac.za/humaneconomy. Ronald * *Coase, an American economist of British origin, won a Nobel prize for inventing the idea of transaction costs in his famous paper The nature of the firm (1937). He is now

Re: nettime P2P Foundation: A Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy (new book)

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 10:52 AM, Felix Stalder fe...@openflows.com wrote: Are markets retreating, after decades of expansion, even as the public sector shrinks as well? This is a great question, Felix. I have thought about the relationship between market and non-market production a lot and

Re: nettime Debt As A Public Good, Berlin #BeautifulTrouble Book Launch w/ @AndrewBoyd @Info_Activism // Attn @BTroublemakers

Hi Dmytri. I agree with: Organizing around debt means uniting against insane policies that promote the interests of rich corporations and rich countries against common households and poorer countries. Much of the debt born my households and the debt born by peripheral nations is a result of bad

Re: nettime Foretaste of the armies of global finance (was: Naomi Wolf, etc.)

Jeez, Patrice, this stuff is amazing. The armies of global finance will be put on show for the first time in London. No wonder the Tories aren't worried about torpedoing the coalition. Electoral politics? Forget it. K On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Patrice Riemens patr...@xs4all.nl wrote: As

Re: nettime Naomi Wolf: This global financial fraud and its gatekeepers (Guardian)

Of course fraud is systemic. The British, having lost a colonial empire, created an illegal financial empire based on the City of London and run through dependencies like the Cayman islands, Jersey, Hong Kong etc. The US was forced to retaliate by setting up its own offshore system at home

Re: nettime Nightmare or Opening? the Soros perspective

There is a lot to engage with in this exchange between Brian and Felix. In a nutshell, Polanyi opposed class analysis as such. Class interests have a serious impact only when they express the interests of society as a whole. These classes can come from anywhere, but what matters is their

Re: nettime Nightmare or Opening?

Hi Brian, For what it's worth, I posted off this chapter to Berlin yesterday for translation into German. You could call it eurodammerung, but I call it: Money in the making of world society: lessons from the euro crisis

Re: nettime Why I say the things I say

Good point, Michael! Come back, Thorstein Veblen, all is forgiven. I am really just making a plea for the introduction of world history into this discussion. The fastest-growing economy in the world between 1890 and 1913 was Russia with an annual growth rate of about 10%, similar to China's

Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?

a limit :) ... -- Prof. Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk 135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere 75009 Paris, France Cell: +33684797365 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering

Re: nettime Political-Economy and Desire

Mark, There are two types of error: telling someone something they know already and not telling them something they don't know. I would rather commit the first type of error, but most of the people I know commit the second. So here goes. Louis Dumont is best known for his work on India. He

Re: nettime A Movement Without Demands?

and inmates like you. Best, Keith On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 9:51 PM, Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.comwrote: One of the questions that Keith Hart asks is: Does the forced marriage of the informal economy and the internet produce classes or interests that the Marxists would once have

Re: nettime A Movement Without Demands?

Ed's intervention, acting as a sort of chorus, links this thread to an earlier one in December, Debt Campaign Launch: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1112/msg8.html. I for one am grateful for this further reflection on important themes. It matters if calling the US today

Re: nettime The Death of the Avant-garde in the Attention Economy

Very interesting, Prem, thanks. I think of time as both linear and timeless. I have an icon of this idea which I call the T-bar. The crossbar constructs tense as a line from past through present to future. The upright is timeless, the present conceived of as rooted in a continuous past. The two

Re: nettime A Movement Without Demands?

I much appreciated your testimony, Greg, as I have Dan Wang's careful descriptions of political action such as in the post just now on Mic Check. And like you I too appreciate Brian's impassioned rationalism. Perhaps I refer too often to him on this list, but the paper that launched this thread

Re: nettime Debt Campaign Launch

Well, Ed, that was worth waiting for, as Brian said. It may seem churlish, after your generous remarks, to harp on the one point of apparent difference between us, but I do so because, while I share many of your views on monopoly capitalism and bureaucracy, I believe that sharpening our historical

Re: nettime Debt Campaign Launch

their specialized activities from social life. I still believe most of that, but I know an awful lot of American intellectuals who don't. Most of them have taken refuge in the universities. Keith Hart On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 9:27 AM, t byfield tbyfi...@panix.com wrote: The secular trend is simple

nettime What do the Tunisian people want from their election?

http://thememorybank.co.uk/2011/10/04/what-do-the-tunisian-people-want-from-their-election/ The governments of the Soviet Union and its East European dependencies fell in 1989-90 with almost no loss of life. How could the most powerful and coercive bureaucracies the planet has ever seen collapse