Teamsters President Sean O'Brien & The Misunderstanding Of Class Analysis

Class is not "how much money you make" or "where you went to school."

In a sign of the strangeness of our time, last week Teamsters President Sean O’Brien gave a rare speech to the Republican National Convention. During the address, O’Brien chastised “the elites” and used the vague, pseudo-populist language commonly employed by ostensible “pro-working class” Republicans. Like many other American politicos, O’Brien misrepresented class analysis as a schism between socially liberal unspecified “elites” and the hypothetical, Trump-loving, soot-covered coal miner they imagine as a stand-in for the American working class. Through this incorrect lens, O’Brien, Republicans, and many others in the political sphere believe a queer barista living in NYC is a member of “the elite” while the owner of a rural construction company is “a worker.” But this isn’t the only deeply-held misunderstanding Americans have about class.

If you ask an average person to define class, they’ll probably provide an income-based definition that segments the population into lower, middle, and upper classes. Such an understanding is as prolific as it is wrong. Class is not determined by income, location, education, or social values. It is determined by a person’s relationship to the means of production. While metrics such as income or education can be useful predictors, class analysis is much more important, as it offers insight into how groups will respond upon reaching a historical inflection point.

The Classes

A person’s class is determined by one thing and one thing only: their relationship to their workplace (also known as “the means of production”). If someone owns a business, they’re in the capitalist class called the bourgeoisie. Capitalists make money by owning things. They hire workers to use their tools, offices, and factories to produce goods and services, which are sold for more than what it costs to pay the workers and buy materials. The difference between the costs and the revenue is profit, which the bourgeoisie survive on.

Capitalist Jeff Bezos looks out over an Amazon warehouse.

There is a subset of the capitalist class called the “petit bourgeoisie.” These are the small business owners that populate your local town. As the petit bourgeois usually work in their own shops but have class interests with larger capitalists, they are considered a “transitional class.” They blur the lines between workers and capitalists. The owner of a small pizza shop is one COVID pandemic away from losing their business and being forced back into the working class to survive. However, they also share the interests of the capitalist class in preserving the current system of private business ownership. This leaves small business owners as something of a question mark. When faced with the possibility of change, they may side with either the working or capitalist class.

(You can learn more about small businesses and socialism here.)

If you don’t own a business, then there’s a good chance you’re in the working class. Members of the proletariat, as they’re called, are forced to sell their labor for a wage in order to survive. They are the ones who staff the capitalists’ factories, stores, and other businesses, creating the valuable products the capitalists sell to acquire profit.

Members of the working class may be highly paid, or they may work for a few dollars a day. Apple pays its Silicon Valley engineers much more than its Congolese lithium miners. However, both of these employees are still part of the working class. This may seem nonsensical, as their incomes and quality of life are unparalleled. But the standard of living is not what class analysis aims to understand. Rather, class is a framework for understanding a group’s interests, which are the primary drivers of societal development.

Class Interest

Classes don’t unite because they share similar pay stubs, but because their economic interests are aligned. Take Jeff Bezos, for example. The Amazon founder is worth $215 billion, or 1,706,349 times what the average American business owner makes every year (between$83,000 and $126,000). While the median business owner is closer in income to the median worker ($60,000 annually), Bezos and the business owners are in the same class because they share the same economic interests. They’re united in wanting to preserve the current system of the private ownership of businesses and the extraction of worker value through wage-labor. Alternatively, the workers, whether they’re high-paid Amazon engineers, minimum wage workers at a warehouse, or impoverished African miners who produce the cobalt that powers the tech economy, share the same interest in curtailing worker exploitation. Global labor protections, unionization, minimum wage increases, or, ideally, a transition from capitalism to socialism, all benefit the working class’s interest in a better life. Conversely, such provisions would harm the capitalist’s interest by decreasing profit or seeing their position erased.

A great example of how class interests materialize can be found in the American Civil War. There’s no denying that free Northern workers had better lives than enslaved persons in the South. Yet, Northern workers supported abolition and fought in the Union Army because the elimination of slavery assisted their class interests. Free Whites feared slavery could expand into mining and manufacturing, decreasing wages and threatening their existence. So, amongst other motivations, their class interests drove them to oppose Southern succession and the continuation of chattel slavery.

“The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.” - Karl Marx on the American Civil War

The Purpose of Class Analysis

While the misconstrued framing of class along income and social lines is typically used to understand voting patterns (higher earners usually vote Republican, lower earners typically vote Democrat, etc.), the Marxist analysis of classes provides a valuable way to understand human history. As the interests of the capitalist and working classes are directly opposed, conflict is guaranteed. What is good for the workers harms the capitalist, and vice versa. This conflict might arise in contained capacities, such as negotiations between a union and an employer, or in grand explosions such as the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. But, rest assured, no matter its scale, conflict will arise. As self-interest is inevitable in humanity, by recognizing classes and their direct opposition to each other, class analysis helps us understand why the world is the way it is and predict how it will develop.

However, classes will only act in their interest if they are aware of them.

The Spanish Civil War was fought between workers’ and the fascist alliance of the military and capitalists.

Underlying the Marxist analysis of class is the notion of class consciousness: whether or not the capitalists and proletariat recognize their class interests. As I wrote recently, capitalists are the most ardent Marxists in that they have unwavering class allegiance. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk might hurl insults at each other, but they’re both aligned in ending worker protections so they can increase profit. (They’re currently co-plaintiffs on a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board.) Unfortunately, American workers have low rates of class consciousness. Nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry and idealism have convinced many American workers that their lives are worse because of other workers. Thanks in part to charlatans like J.D. Vance and Sean O’Brien, they prioritize a division between the “woke” and “unwoke” sections of the working class instead of unifying against the capitalists that oppress them. This is a trick as old as capitalism itself: Convince the workers that their biggest problems are DEI corporate hires and queer teachers, and they’ll forget all about the class war.

Contrary to what capitalist media claims, we should replace the culture war with class war.

This is where my frustration with O’Brien boils into rage. Not only is he purporting the Republican’s bigotry for personal prestige, but him doing so actively harms the working class. It distracts us with needless infighting when we should be organizing against our true adversary, the capitalist class. Fortunately, Teamsters have already moved against O’Brien for his class treachery. The Vice President John Palmer announced he will challenge O’Brien for the Teamsters presidency, and one social media manager took it upon themselves to rebuke their president through the union’s official account.

By fully understanding the concept of class and the purpose of analyzing it, we see through Sean O’Brien’s short sighted bigotry and menial divisions, empowering us to fight for the ultimate goal: organizing the working class to strive for its interest in a better, more equitable world.

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In Solidarity — Joe