‘Middle Class’ decline mirrors fall of unions in one chart (US)

"Middle class" here is defined as "the middle 60 percent of households" by income. So what's really been talked about is the middle 60 percent of income-receivers, most of whom will of course be members of the working class properly defined.In the olden days, the ICC would probably have said it was a conspiracy by the unions, at the behest of the capitalist state, to reduce their own membership and so effectiveness so as to allow the income of the workers concerned to fall. These days they would more probably point to this part of the news item as confirmation of their view that workers are better off without unions:

What should we make of it? First, that the middle 60 percent of incomes is not a very meaningful group. Second, that "middle class" is not a useful description of it as class is determined not by income but relationship to the means of production. Third, that a group's declining share of total income does not necessarily mean (as the title, but not the small print, of the graph suggests) a decline in their real income.

It's another interesting but different graph, showing this time how, since the 1960s, the share of national income of the top 10% has gone up at the same time as the percentage of workers unionised has gone down.I'm not sure, though,  that we can conclude that the share of the top 10% went up because the percentage of workers in unions went down. We certainly can't argue that if union membership hadn't declined then the share of the top 10% would not have gone up. That would be to attribute to unions a power they don't have.Unions may (and do) have the power, when first set up, to increase the wages of their members (and some others) and then to more or less maintain this in the long run (pushing up wages in boom times and slowing down wage cuts in slump times), but that's as far as they can go.Not even governments can reducee income inequality. Reformist governments have tried but failed and given up. Instead, in recent decades, governments have helped capitalism's tendency to increased inequality, by reducing taxes on profits and high incomes. Government anti-union legislation, making unions less effective in their limited sphere, may have been a factor but only a minor one.Union membership will have declined in line with the decreased share of manufacturing (where they were well organised) in GDP.  But even if union membership hadn't declined I think the top 10 percent's share would still have gone up.

I don't know, but in the 1920s there were some members who argued that the trade-union struggle was not part of the class struggle but merely a "commodity struggle", which elicited this response in the Socialist Standard of the time:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1920/no-195-november-1920/commodity-struggle-or-class-struggleA similar position is taken up today by some "ultra-left" groups (quite a few in fact) who dismiss the wages struggles as merely variable capital trying to realise its value.

That was my caricature of their implacable anti-union position. They see unions as agents of the capitalist state and all permanent organisations formed by workers as unions, and they have argued that workers would be better off without them and should rely instead on ephemeral temporary strike committees.I imagine that they would interpret the graph as proof of the uselessness of unions and would find some convoluted way to attribute to the unions some responsibility for what it shows.

Hadn't heard of it before, but as a registered trade union the Pop-Up Union  would anathema for the ICC. They would see it as an agent of the state like all other unions.http://popupunion.org/Breakaway unions and ginger groups are not new in the history of the working class or even of the SPGB. In the 1930s a Party member was prominent in setting up a breakaway busmen's union from the TGWU (now Unite), the National Passenger Workers Union and later, after the war, in setting up another breakaway union from the TGWU in the docks. Other Party members remained in the TGWU. So there were Party members in rival unions. Ken Fuller in his history of the London busworkers Radical Aristocrats writes:

Fuller gives the source for this as Lewisham Borough News of 26 July 1938. I haven't seen this report but it sounds as if it might be worth tracking down.The Party decision seems to have been not to intervene, but to leave individual members, as well as individual workers, to join the union of their choice (as long as they joined a union).  A reflection, I suppose, of our general position of not trying to take over workers' struggles. Though it has always been our position not to support breakaway "socialist" or "revolutionary" unions, as was once the policy of the old DeLeonist SLP and of the Communist Party at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s.Not that the Pop-Up Union seems to be setting itself up as a rival to the existing unions, more as a ginger group allowing membership of other unions, to influence them. Which is what the IWW has become as well. Since some members are in the IWW I wouldn't have thought that whether or not to join the Pop-Up Union would be up to individuals members, but I can't see the Party adopting the policy of encouraging such unions.But is the Pop-Up Union still going?

Thomas Piketty said in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century that USA will be the first developed country to lose its middle class (middle 40%) then some time later European countries will follow suit finally Scandinavian coutries will lose theirs… but he also believed before that transpires huge political unrest will take place… it will not happen peacefully.All their wealth will trickle up to the 1%, the middle class will lose ownership of their houses.

Middle class is a fallacy created by the capitalist class, and workers do not own anything in the capitalist society, we do not even own a lot in the cemetery. Those houses are just rented to a bank for 30 or 40 years, and the banks hold the lien, and in some places the state owns the land, and peoples continue renting the land to the state, it is an eternal cycle, in some third world countries people are better off because they own the property and the own the land. We are all workers, or wage slaves.In the USA in 2008 the so called Middle Class lost their jobs, their false illusion were vanished, they lost their inflated homes, they lost their car, and credit cards, and they were making lines to collect unemployment, and some had to move with their parents, and then, they came to the conclusion, that they were wages slaves. The expression: I am a member of the middle class and you are a member of the working class, it just an illusory expression to make some members of the working class to feel that they were better off than others members of the working class, but they were in the same hole,  working for a bunch of thieves That conception of the 1% vs the 99% is just another construction  of the capitalist class, which keep peoples fighting for reforms, and the so called inequality, , the real situation is that the majority of the human beings are slaves and produce everything, and one small group does not work and they steal our labor, they are just a bunch of thieves, worst than the ones that they keep in jailsOur society is divided in two classes only: The capitalist class and the working class, and our interests are different and they can not be reconciled, and passing laws and regulation the antagonism is not going to be resolved, we must expropriate the expropriator, and send them to the fucking hell, they are our class enemies, and when we vote for them, we become  their tailgater and their lackeys, we do not need them, they need us