Kingdoms, czarisms, and oligarchies were then overthrown as a result of this. Eventually, some of these social movements gathered enough strength to dislodge those rulers and end autocracies in residential communities. These movements were sometimes able to alter relations between the ruler and the ruled, but usually succeeded only to a limited degree and temporarily. The democratic impulses that were provoked and suppressed in turn by monarchical autocracies occasionally matured into social movements. Their autocratic governance reinforces and is reinforced by the unequal distributions of income and wealth that they generate. An owner, an owning family, a partnership of owners, or a board of directors elected by major shareholders comprises the ruler in capitalist enterprises. Inside most workplace communities in today’s world, an individual or small subgroup within the workplace community, a ruling group, governs the workplace community. In societies where capitalism prevails, enterprises are very rarely organized democratically. Workplace communities are those collections of interacting individuals comprising enterprises: factories, offices, and stores. The capitalist economic system generates precisely that unequal distribution of income and wealth that creates and sustains a wide gap between formal and real democracy in the world today. However, they usually allow individuals with high levels of income and wealth to use these means to influence others in their voting, whereas individuals with low levels of income and wealth can and usually do wield less influence. Residential communities in many parts of the modern world operate in formal democracies. How real this formal democracy is depends on the inclusivity of the population voting and the concrete reality of voters’ equal influence on the election’s outcome. Universal suffrage is clearly a step toward at least formal democracy because voters elect leaders.

Its other, autocracy, exists when a community organizes (or allows) its governance by an individual or subgroup of that community, a ruler. Democracy exists if and when a community organises its self-governance around the full participation, on an equal basis, of all the members of the community.

Richard wolff understanding socialism