On Feb 23, 2012, at 11:25 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
> James: "democracy, which means ‘the rule by the people’"
>
> [WS:] That is a pretty meaningless phrase. Who are "the people"?
"The people" has two senses. In one it is plural, standing for the ensemble of individual persons in a society or social group, "*We* the people of the United States..." In the other it is singular, standing for the relatively unpropertied segment of society (the "lower classes," the "99 percent," "the commons," "the working classes," etc.) It is in this sense that we, and just about everyone else, uses the term "the people."
The Greek word for "the people" is δημοσ, *demos*, and democracy thus means literally rule by the demos, the working classes. Marx and Engels were as explicit as possible on this point in the Manifesto when they identify the establishment of proletarian dictatorship over the propertied classes with the establishment of democracy. So James is quite correct, insofar as the fraudulent bourgeois "democracy" nevertheless involves the formal (though only formal) possibility of the working classes, overwhelmingly preponderant in the electorate, establishing real democracy (what Marxists call the dictatorship of the proletariat) through constitutional processes.
Shane Mage
"scientific discovery is basically recognition of obvious realities that self-interest or ideology have kept everybody from paying attention to"