Class Hybrids: From Medieval Europe to Silicon Valley

Abstract

Within the medieval guild workshop, small masters operated as class hybrids that personified a distinct economic form. Marx's Capital shows how these masters served as a thread stitching together the historical break that transformed Europe into an industrialized capitalist society. Despite their role in this transition, the proliferation of such hybrids has been undertheorized, even though the coexistence of different kinds of class structures is quite possible in today's corporations. Capitalist class structures may combine in the same enterprise with slave, feudal, ancient, or even communist class structures. To further understand such sites, this paper offers a basic class theory of hybrids. An immediate political importance arises from the possibility that collective-based employment may often develop only in a hybrid. As a result, a new theory and politics of transition beyond capitalism emerges.

Key Words:

• Class Analysis
• Guild
• Hybridity
• Societal Transition
• Marxian Theory

Acknowledgments

I thank Serap Kayatekin and an anonymous reviewer for many helpful editorial comments and suggestions. Judith Chien deserves mention for her gifted copyediting assistance.

Notes

1. This point builds upon an idea found in Reading Capital, where Étienne Balibar explains periods of class transition as characterized by “the coexistence of two (or more) modes of production in a single ‘simultaneity’” (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 307).

2. Kayatekin (1990, 1996) provides an in-depth explanation of sharecropping that explores its various forms in both feudalism and capitalism. See Levin (2004) for an extended attempt to build upon her initial research by exploring the possibility of class-structural hybrids at these production sites.

3. While feudal/capitalist class-structural hybrids may serve as a development path between feudalism and capitalism, it is definitely not the only route. Marx himself in volume 3 of Capital explains how ancient class structures or independent producers on the land often served this same transition (1991, 940–50).

4. The variability in translation that has allowed the words “intermediate” and “hybrid” to become interchangeable can be partly explained by a passage from Marx's (1953, 411) Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, where the German words Mittelgattungen and Zwittergattungen are treated as equivalents. The former most literally means “intermediate species” while the latter refers to “hybrid species.” Despite the existence of these two different terms, some translators have dropped the use of the one in favor of the other. For example, see Martin Nicolaus's translation of the Grundrisse, which uses the term “intermediate species” exclusively (Marx 1993, 512). For a contrasting approach, see the same passage from Jack C. Cohen's 1964 English translation of Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (1857–1858), which explicitly couples the two terms and refers to “intermediate or hybrid types” (Marx 1975, 117).

5. To better understand “the confrontation between Marx's Early Works and Capital” and for an in-depth analysis of Marx's method, see Althusser (1969, 13). A focus on class hybrids both follows along and builds in its own unique way upon the Althusserian Marxist perspective.

6. In the original German language version, Das Kapital, Marx describes the small master, or kleiner Meister, as a Mittelding (Marx 1967, 326), which translates into English literally as a “middle thing.” However, Mittelding can also be translated as “something between” or “an intermediate thing” or even as “hybrid.”

7. See Marx (1990, 423, 448, 635, 900, 914; 1991, 452, 729, 735; 1993, 512).

8. See Kayatekin and Charusheela (2004) and Amariglio (2010) for recent literature on subjectivity.

9. See also Kuh (1988), Gabriel (1990, 96), Kayatekin (1990), and Gibson-Graham (1996) for further examples of the possible extension of the work of Resnick and Wolff in order to include combined class-structural forms.

10. See Resnick and Wolff (1987, 117, 129, 165, 170).

11. See Cameron (1996) for work raising questions about an initial terminological problem regarding the understated multiplicity of class structures in a household. Cameron's recognition of an inadequate concept can be systematized to include production sites generally.

12. We cannot ignore the fact that others have labeled these sites. Just as Marx uses the term “hybrid,” so do others like Gabriel (1990) and Murray (2002). Kuh (1988) has used the term “composites.” Resnick and Wolff (1987) refer to “complex class structures,” while Kayatekin (1990) calls them “sites of multiple class processes.” Finally, Althusser and Balibar (1970) talk about “the coexistence of two (or more) modes of production.” However, these predecessors never systematically explore the link between class and the concept of hybrid in any sustained manner.

13. A positive aspect of this theory, as of all Marxian theory, is that it enables one to speak what previously could not be spoken. With this paper, class-structural hybrids become no longer a repressed discourse.

14. In Das Kapital the term Zwitterformen appears, which translates as “hybrid forms” (Marx 1967, 533).

15. For example, a corn hybrid would involve a combination of different kinds of corn.

16. Parenthetically, each particular kind of class-structural hybrid may exist in different forms too, depending on its coexisting social and natural processes.

17. As a clarifying point, the possible existence of structural nonclass hybrids should also be mentioned. These could occur because a single production site may combine differing forms of a single kind of class structure. This would be the case wherever hierarchical and egalitarian forms of capitalism coexist. In this situation, a capitalist class structure would be understood to coexist with a hybrid of hierarchical and egalitarian nonclass structures.

18. See Resnick and Wolff (1987, 117–8) for explanation of the five basic class structures.

19. Therefore, each society can be understood as a structure composed of a combination of sites; each site is conceived as a structure built from a set of relationships, and each relationship is seen as a structure distinguished by an amalgamation of constituent processes. Hence, all structures in society can be broken down into some aggregate of component processes, and any subset of a given structure's elements can be understood as one of its substructures. Accordingly, each site is a substructure in the sense that it constitutes a subset of processes in a society; each relationship, too, is a substructure in that it represents a subset of processes at a site. Any combination of processes can thus be understood as a structure and/or substructure.

20. In fact, it is possible to talk about the number of forms for each class structure as infinite. The full ensemble of economic, cultural, and political elements that constitutes each site defies reduction to any pure kind of class structure. However, emphasizing boundless complexity in the changing conditions of existence for each site is a secondary theoretical consideration. The primary discursive goal is to normalize the existence of communist class structures. This leads to a couple of strategic moves. One is to create a conceptual lens of class hybrid in order to better see communist class structures in today's economy, even when they coexist in hybrids with capitalist class structures. The second move is to rely upon that same lens to better see the fluidity and change between capitalist class structures and communist class structures. The ultimate hope is to create a theoretical condition for an expanded scale of communal production.

21. The term “kind” is used in Capital, volume 3, where Marx (1991, 1018) describes capitalism as “a mode of production of a particular kind and a specific historical determinacy.” Marxian theory's five class structures can be distinguished from one another on the following basis: ancient, where an individual performs and appropriates his or her own surplus labor; communist, where a group performing surplus labor also collectively appropriates it; and slave, feudal, and capitalist, all three of which class structures are similar in that each involves a group or individual who performs surplus labor for some other group or individual that appropriates it. The last three do differ from one another in the many other qualities of nonclass processes that constitute their many various forms of existence.

22. Note also the possibility of even further gradations within these different forms of capitalism, reflecting more detailed aspects of their many varying nonclass conditions of existence.

23. For any set containing n elements, it is possible to form 2ⁿ subsets, including the set itself and the empty set. As a result there are 2⁵ −1, or thirty-one, possible kinds of production site; five consist of the basic kinds of class structure, and twenty-six are distinct kinds of class-structural hybrids.

24. This story is informed by and relies upon a reading of many concrete histories of this industry. See the literature on computer firms, including Kidder (1981), Ackroyd (1995), Jackson (1997), Lewis (1999), and Edwards (1999).

25. It is ironic to note that Xerox engineers are credited with the graphic user interface research necessary for both Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems (Edwards 1999, 9).

26. Though completely different in their conceptual framework, others have come up against complex sites that defy “pure” categorization. For an illustration, see Bim, Jones, and Weisskopf (1993).