Who is us?

"Who's we"

That depends on the banner you raise up to organize around and who you can get to organize with you under that banner.

Generally speaking, the main contradiction in a capitalist society is the contradiction between the owning class and the working class. The owning class is a part of society who is completely dependent on the value that's created by workers in order to maintain and grow their wealth. They extract this value either by acting as the gatekeeper between labor and the tools that labor uses in the case of your employer, or by acting as the gatekeeper between you and your means of subsistence such as housing in the case of a landlord.

Those who hold this position in society have a shared class interest in maintaining an economic, legal, and political system that allows them to maintain and utilize this leverage. So even though these ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations are often competing with each other on the market to see who can capture a larger share of society's wealth, they will still often work together in pursuing and maintaining their shared class interests through lobbying and funding the political campaign process to ensure that their collective interests are represented on issues such as anti-union legislation, corporate tax codes, and consistently increasing the funding of the massive police state that maintains their corporate empires and which allows people like Jeff Bezos to claim authority over the workings of an institution that is comparable in size to the economy of entire countries.

Since it is the class interests of the ownership class to use their leverage to increase their wealth, and all new wealth requires the application of labor in order to be brought into existence, the interests of the ownership class comes into direct conflict with the interests of the workers who are creating that wealth. The only way that an owner can increase their wealth is by employing a member of the public to create new value with their labor, and then pocketing as much of that value as possible by paying the worker as little as possible in return. A competitive labor market helps give employers the leverage to do this, since having millions of people fighting with each other who are willing to work for scraps because they are either saddled with debt or are just desperate to earn enough to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads inevitably drives down wages.

But just like the ownership class has shared class interest, those of us in the working class have shared class interests as well. Historically, one of the ways that this conflict was resolved in favor of the workers is that workers would voluntarily organize into unions so that they could wield collective bargaining power and give themselves the leverage to make demands for higher wages and better conditions that they couldn't make when negotiating as individuals. Because if you try to negotiate as an individual and ask for the full value that your labor is worth as compensation, your boss knows they can say, "Fuck you, why should I pay you what you're worth when I know there's a thousand chumps looking for a job who are desperate and willing to work for scraps? I'll just hire one of them if you don't like it here." But when you have a critical mass of the workforce organized under unified leadership, the workers suddenly have the leverage to say "pay us our fair share from the proceeds of our own labor, or else we will refuse to work and your empire of factories and warehouses will be nothing more than idle, deprecating assets that are losing value for every day that you aren't able to come to an agreement with us."

And while I don't believe that union organizing is the full extent of the organizing that should be done, it does provide an illustrative example of the power of solidarity and collective action.

So when you ask the question, "Who is us?," I presume the point you're getting at is that I can't speak for other people and claim them as being on my side. Which is a salient point. The only thing I can do is provide an analysis of the systematic problems that we all come into contact with, try to identify what the primary contradiction driving those problems are, identify where my own interests lie and which parts of society share those interests, and then advocate for a theory of change which would advance those shared interests and use that as a banner to rally people around.