Democracy genuinely threatens capitalist economic priorities, so capitalism is antidemocratic.

Evidence

The terrible realization is that these economists are not simply wrong. It is true that social demands may endanger economic priorities. Social redistribution risks tilting power relations too much in favor of the working class. For example, if people were able to pressure their governments into providing a dignified basic income, workers would no longer need to submit to the coercion of wage labor; profits, the engine of capitalist economic growth, would decline as businesses would have to raise wages to attract workers who might otherwise leave the workforce. For our system to function optimally, citizens must be excluded from decisions regarding society’s production and distribution of resources. It is thus profoundly antidemocratic. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 372

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the chapter’s core provocation — Mattei concedes the economists are right that social demands endanger economic priorities, then flips the normative judgment: it is capitalism, not democracy, that must be exposed as the problem.
• XREF: The basic income thought experiment directly connects to the reader’s goal of stress-testing ‘democracy is anti-capitalism’; also echoes Parable of the Sower’s engagement with survival economics. — connects to: Capitalism functionally requires excluding citizens from economic decisions. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 372; Austerity operates as capitalism’s counteroffensive against democratically empowered labor. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1547; Universal suffrage in capitalist states inevitably produces social-democratic majorities — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 102 (+2 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘basic income test’ as a diagnostic — ask of any economic arrangement whether dignified income would break it, revealing its coercive core.