The political turbulence visible in the 2010s (Brexit, Trump, etc.) stems not from temporary failures but from the structural decline of Western capitalism as production moves to Asia, creating conditions of economic anxiety that destabilize political institutions.

Wealthy capitalists intentionally undermine political democracy because they understand that in a genuine democratic system, numerical majorities (non-wealthy people) could use voting to redistribute wealth and undo capitalist achievements through taxation or expropriation.

Karl Marx was born in 1818, the first generation after the French Revolution, and was a tremendous admirer of the Revolution's slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity, which he hoped capitalism would deliver, but after observing 50 years of capitalist development in Europe by the time he became a young man, he found no evidence these ideals were being achieved.

The way voting works in corporations, each share gets one vote, so if someone owns 27 million shares (like a major bank), they control millions of votes while a worker with 11 shares controls 11 votes, making it mathematically impossible for ordinary shareholders to influence corporate elections.

Mondragon has a rule that the highest-paid person cannot earn more than eight times the income of the lowest-paid person, solving the problem of inequality by capping pay differentials.

Capitalism has been characterized by fundamental disagreement about how to understand economic systems, unlike fields with scientific consensus, with debates as stark as whether the sun goes around the earth or vice versa.

The Great Depression (1929-1941) involved unemployment rates hovering around 20-25%, demonstrating capitalism's inability to self-correct and leading to John Maynard Keynes' argument that government intervention was necessary to prevent revolution.

Keynesian economics dominated from roughly the 1940s to the 1970s, then was entirely pushed out and replaced with pre-1930s economic thinking that rehabilitated the private market as the solution.

In autumn 2008, September to December, the US economy came dangerously close to total systemic collapse—no milk, no bread, no buses—representing the second major capitalist crash in 75 years.

The fundamental difference between Keynesian and neoclassical approaches is not whether to solve capitalism's problems, but whether government intervention is necessary; both accept capitalism as the basic system, making this debate secondary to deeper critiques.

The corporation, as the dominant institution of capitalist production, concentrates power in a tiny group: shareholders (1% own about two-thirds of shares) and a board of directors (12-20 people), who make all key decisions about what to produce, how, where, and what to do with profits.

Whereas political democracy demands that citizens who must live with government decisions participate in making them, capitalist enterprise explicitly excludes workers from participating in decisions they must live with, making capitalism fundamentally undemocratic.

Marx concluded that capitalism is not merely unable to deliver liberty, equality, and fraternity, but is fundamentally an obstacle to achieving them; therefore humanity must devise an alternative system or perpetually bump against capitalism's inherent limits.

An employer hires a worker only if that worker's output in an hour will be worth more than the hourly wage paid; therefore workers always produce more value than they receive in wages—a surplus that becomes profit and is appropriated by owners.

Capitalism produces two defining characteristics: stunning instability with economic downturns every 4-7 years on average throughout capitalism's 300-year history, and extreme inequality, both stemming from the system's structural concentration of power and profit-taking.

American higher education institutions in the Cold War deliberately excluded Marxist analysis from economics education out of fear, preventing students from understanding critical alternatives to capitalist economics and thus crippling the country's ability to address economic problems.

When corporations automate jobs to increase profits, the private corporation captures the profit gain while bearing no cost for the social consequences (unemployment, depression, family dissolution, community decay), making automation socially unprofitable even when privately profitable.

The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain, a collection of 150-200 worker cooperatives employing 100,000 workers, is now the seventh-largest corporation in Spain and has outcompeted dozens of capitalist enterprises while maintaining an 8:1 maximum wage ratio (vs. 350:1 in US corporations).

Real wages in the United States have been stagnant for 35 years—equal to late 1970s levels—and Americans sustained consumption growth only through women entering the workforce and debt accumulation, creating an unsustainable situation that contributed to the 2008 crash.

Capitalist corporations have systematically relocated production from Western Europe, North America, and Japan (where capitalism was born) to China, India, and Brazil since the 1970s due to lower wages and modern telecommunications allowing remote management, causing Western capitalism to decline while Eastern capitalism booms.