Who are The People?

The trend these days is that words are used by writers and speakers in such ways to conceal, rather than reveal, their true meanings. The irony is that such users are only interested in a narrow objective: being unnecessarily mysterious or mischievous.Those that belong to the first school believe that being pedantic is a quality of scholastic ability. The battlecry seems to be the more mysterious the work,the more cerebrathe author is thought to be.Pick any of the books written by Aristotle and you will understand what I’m trying to say.To put it mildly,there is an absence of communication between such an author and his readers. As for those who belong to the other school of thought, a word with a restricted or narrow meaning can be used in an ambivalent manner, insofar as our aim – to deceive – is achieved.Unfortunately,”the people” happens to be one of such abused or misused terms in the English lexicon. The ordinary or original meaning is now extended to have economic or ideological connotations as can be seen below:

ECONOMIC MEANING:
During the era when the world was divided into two ideological camps,starting from the 1917 October Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/1990,the concept, ”the people”, in the Soviet bloc referred to the working class. The working class was an alliance of the proletariat(industrial workers) and the peasants(farm workers) brought about because the proletariat was a negligible minority, the USSR, being a backward agrarian society. These were represented by the Bolsheviks and Menshelviks, accounting for less than 20% of the Russian population. Then, the kulaks(rural middle class),the bourgeois(urban middle class) and other unclassified people made up more than 80% of the population. In the West, on the other hand,” the people” is a loose term for the ”common people” or the masses.They are mischievously believed to be the deciders of the destiny of every society. In actual fact, they have the advantage of numbers but they are ruled,used and abused by the class Leninists/ Marxists referred to as the  bourgeioisie(the negligible middleclass in all Western/capitalist countries)The people, in Socialist/Communist countries therefore, were the minority class(the proletariat, that later transformed into the majority party) while the bourgeiosie was to recede from the most prominent to the most insignificant.