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In case you havent had a chance to read Thomas Pikettys 700-page tome, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," heres the basic summary: Wealth grows faster than economic input. Other than the period of middle-class expansion that occurred in the mid-20th century, maintains Piketty, when global wars and the Depression disrupted the growth of wealth, "patrimonial capitalism" is the hallmark of global economics.

"The entire recent history of the twentieth century ... can be read as a recuperation of capitalist hegemony through the return of the figure of the bourgeois," writes Mario Tronti, in "Towards a Critique of Political Democracy."

In other words, weve been handed a bill of goods -- while the promises of our consumer society have been dangled in front of our noses, economic elites have reasserted their control over our lives, all the while espousing the joys of democracy.

But in "An Anarchist Critique of Democracy," Moxie Marlinspike and Windy Hart write that it makes no difference whether we transfer control of our lives to an elected representative or to an elusive majority.

"The point is that its no longer your own. The conditions of our existence are not under our control ... when we lose our connection with the desires and passions that drive us forward, it is impossible to wrest back control of our lives and we are left to linger in a condition of passivity."

Some philosophers, such as Luciano Canfora, argue the manipulation of the mass media, the collapse of political opinions into the "policy bundles" of a two-party system and the gerrymandering that reinforces the system are the natural results of this thing we call democracy.

"We have to consider the possibility that the current state of American politics, with its bizarre combination of poisoned, polarized and artificially overheated debate along with total paralysis on every substantive issue and widespread apathy and discontent, is what we get after 200-odd years," writes Salons Andrew OHehir. "In the ancient world, Plato understood democracy as a destructive force that led to demagoguery, mob rule, cultural mediocrity and pointless nationalistic warfare, and based on the evidence of 21st-century America, its tough to dismiss that altogether."

"Democracy today is not the power of the majority. It is, as we were trying to suggest through the categories of identity and of the homogeneous people, the power of all. Democracy is precisely the process of the homogenization, of the massification of thoughts, feelings, tastes (and) behaviors ..." writes Tronti.

He argues that there is no saving democracy because this is its organic end result.

"This theoretical-practical knot that is democracy," he writes, "can now be judged by its results (and) should not be read as a false democracy in the face of which there is or should be a true democracy, but as the coming-true of the ideal, or conceptual, form of democracy."

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Democracy -- is this all weve got?