CLASS, CAPITALISM, and DEMOCRACY 
INTRODUCTION
(read this first)

Folks, People, Guys:
The links below take you to relevant material that defines and further explores class, capitalism, and democracy. After reading this introduction, please study this material carefully, including the images. (Repeat, including the images!)

In case you did not know, the socio-economic system we live under is called capitalism. Every aspect of our lives, from the moment we are born to the moment we die (and may be even thereafter, depending on who you are) is governed by the dictates of the capitalist system through the monopolistic control of time, calendar, healthcare, education, employment, housing, burials/cremation, insurance, and so on, and so on, by a group of people called the capitalist class--the privileged class that dominates any capitalist system.

Capitalism is an ideology--that is, a formal way of thinking for the specific purpose of shaping human behavior. Capitalism, however, is also the name given to the socio-economic system that the ideology justifies that shapes how human beings in a given society are born, live, prosper, and die.

However, the central purpose of capitalism is to facilitate the limitless accumulation of wealth for the capitalist class, by whatever means possible, via the labor of the working classes on whom the system ultimately depends.

Therefore, the capitalist system is designed, by means of law and business practices, to ensure that inquality is built into the system. In fact, capitalism requires inequality because not everyone can be allowed to be members of the capitalist class. Why? Because someone still has to pick up the garbage; build and repair the roads; plant, grow, and harvest the grain and the produce; nurse the sick; drive the trains and buses; clean and maintain the hospitals; serve customers in the supermarket; wash the dishes in a restaurant; and so on and so forth; and that someone will be a member of the working class, the underprivileged class.

Now, in this country, who is allowed to become a member of the capitalist class and who becomes a member of the working class is dependent on a variety of historically-determined factors (repeat, historically-determined factors) dealing with gender, race, ethnicity, pre-capitalist socio-economic origins (slavery, fuedalism, hunting and gathering, etc.), and other similar factors.

Since capitalism requires inequality in the means of livelihood upon which depends a person's material quality of life, how deep and widespread that inequality can be permitted to go depends on how well the political system we call democracy works--in both its forms, procedural, and authentic--in ensuring access to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." (In other words, there is an inherent contradiction between democracy and capitalism.)

As already indicated, the links below take you to relevant material that defines and further explores class, capitalism, and democracy. After reading this introduction, please study this material carefully, including the images. (Repeat, including the images!)