Industrial Workers of the World

In my book there are three major classes in modern, industrialised societies of the world:

A. the working class, the people who must sell their skills and time on the labour market to an employer for wages (aka salary) in order to make a living.  Ninety percent of the people in industrialised societies are in the working class, no matter how they identify as individauls e.g. blacks, whites, gays, women, men and so on.  The I.W.W. wants this class to organize One Big Union so that it can have the power to make life richer and freer while living in harmony with the Earth.

B. the capitalist class (aka the employing class), the people who must hire/purchase wage labourers' time.  Capitalists make a living by appropriating the product of their labourers and selling it on the market.  Wages are a fraction of the the value of the total product of any combination of workers hired by an employer.  The capitalist class is already organised in corporations, the chamber of commerce and the political State.

C. the landlord class, the people who make their living by buying land and other 'real' property and either selling or renting it out to others for their use.  Landlords are also organized and buy their share of bourgeois politicians to represent their interests in the State apparatus.

To be sure, there are divisions within the working class between those who can fetch more money from their employers for their skills than others.  Because skill is a commodity in the marketplace, it sells for differing prices depend on how dear it is and how much time has been spend producing/educating/training it. 

There are also individuals who sell their skills directly to consumers e.g. some lawyers and some doctors who aren't hired by group employers.  These people are not part of the three major classes outlined above.  One might designate these people as the modern "middle class". 

Most of the people living in the U.S.A. think of themselves as 'Middle Class".  A lot of 'radicals' call people who are working class, 'middle class", thus fostering the illusion that the working class is smaller than it actually is AND very importantly, that the working class and this "middle class" have no interests in common. 

Your rulers love these kinds points of view.  Divide and rule.  Divide and be ruled.  The workers divided will always be defeated.  Yes, your rulers rub their hands together, smile and think, "Let us prey."

********

Confused notions about class are surveyed at the links below:

http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/706/middle-class-pollhttp://pewsocialtrends.org/assets/pdf/MC-Middle-class-report.pdf