One of the many riots I have witnessed was the 1988 anti-World Bank demonstration in West Berlin. Around 100,000 people showed up to tell the rich that even though they did not understand a thing about economics, they disapproved of them anyway.
For about 10 days they chanted, rampaged and chucked things at the cops. The West German polizei played their part in turn, beating the sense out of any demonstrator unlucky enough to get within baton-range.
I like to think they took to the streets for nobler reasons than the mobs in the streets of London or Athens. After all, demanding an end to Third World debt seems a better excuse for wrecking other people's stuff than wanting Adidas trainers.
But I have to admit their grasp of the economic issues was non-existent, which is mandatory for any aspiring socialist.
As it happened, their chants soon became irrelevant. Within two years, the Berlin Wall - built 50 years ago this month - had fallen, and the real communists, the people who lived in the shadow of uncle Karl, made clear how they felt about it. They also wanted to be capitalists, with mortgages, credit cards and junk food. So the Left slunk away in embarrassment and even the world's last remaining communist governments, in Vietnam and China, adopted market economics.
Trotsky glasses gave way to wraparound Ray-Bans. And noxious little Trabants were abandoned for quietly efficient BMWs.
For a time, then, it seemed Marx, was, after all wrong. We had reached, as United States academic Francis Fukuyama said, "The End of History". Then again, maybe not. In any case, you know we are in trouble when some of the world's capitalist effigies are saying that it might be possible, after all, to be too rich.
Centrist economist Nouriel Roubini, who teaches at New York University and is one of the early predictors of the 2008 crash, says maybe we shouldn't write off Marx so fast after all: "Karl Marx had it right," he told the Wall Street Journal. "At some point, capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labour to capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand."
Critics of Marx have long pointed out that he did not anticipate the rise of consumer society. Workers failed to rise against their capitalist masters because for the longest time, they too enjoyed the benefits of increased wealth. The average Joe might not be a billionaire, but by golly, he had his big-screen TV, La-Z-Boy and crisps. If that won't keep him from baying at the barricades, I don't know what will.
Henry Ford, the flint-hearted father of mass production knew this very well. He paid his workers $5 (Dh18) a day to work on his assembly lines, a generous salary for the time, from a man known for his tight wad ways. But Ford knew that as factory-line manufacturing took root, labourers had to earn enough to buy what they made. If they did not, capitalism would not survive.
Unfortunately, this bargain has begun to fray. Warren Buffett, the world's wealthiest investor, says as much in this week's New York Times. Mr Buffet says the wealthy should pay more taxes and do not need to be "coddled" by congress.
Mr Buffet, who is worth around $45 billion, has a few more pennies in his pocket than most of us. But his views also reflect the growing awareness that the divide between the very rich, and everyone else, is becoming too uncomfortable to ignore.
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the late President of the UAE, set about redistributing the nation's oil wealth as soon as he came to power. The result was to kick-start the economies of the Emirates and set them on the path to modernisation.
It's not likely this will happen anywhere else in the near future. But it's clear the western economies are in trouble. And many are rethinking the fundamental rules of how we do things.
Ultimately, its unlikely capitalism is going to collapse, as some have predicted. It remains fundamentally creative and dynamic. As long as there is money to be made, smart people will try to figure out the kinks.
After more than two decades of unrivalled triumph, however, we've reached the point where capitalism is looking vulnerable. Interesting times indeed.
Gavin du Venage is a business writer and entrepreneur based in South Africa. pf@thenational.ae