I grew up in sixties Australia, when unions were strong, and used strike action to get better conditions for their members, usually successfully. Workers saw themselves as producers of goods, and thus entitled to a fair share of the economic pie. The Australian Labor Party, during the same period, used the power of the ballot box to extract taxation revenue from the rich to fund a universal health scheme and universal state education.
In 1848, Karl Marx saw, correctly, that there is class conflict between bosses and workers, and that force would be needed to get better pay and conditions for workers. Better conditions included safe working conditions and an end to child labor. Marx did not foresee the power of one man one vote, nor that, in the twentieth century, class conflict would not mean blood in the streets and class hatred.
The recent 99% Occupy Wall Street movement is simply a continuation of conventional Marxist class conflict, but again need not mean class hatred or violence. There is some connection with Mustachianism because young Mustachians need a well paid job to accumulate investments, and spreading automation threatens the supply of jobs.
Conservative political parties have always promoted the interests of those living off unearned income in the form of dividend or rents. Think of the world of Bertie Wooster, or the characters in the novels of Dornford Yates, and real life equivalents of these idlers protected their interests by voting for conservative parties. I know that not all supporters of conservative parties live off unearned income.
Today, the problem is different. The rising tide of mechanization and automation forces many workers, even skilled ones, to compete with machines, and are thus competing with the equivalent of slave labor. Machines produce a lot of wealth, and it is appropriate for people to use power at the ballot box to extract a living from the economy because jobs are disappearing.
What are needed are political parties who promote the interests of those who are idlers because they have lost their jobs to machines, and need to extract an income from the economy even though they do not work. Such people are in a similar position to those who extract unearned income from investments. I mean no criticism of idlers, whether the modern type, or Bertie Wooster.