Possession, investment and profit

The multiplication of meanings implies a specialization of subjects (artisans, officials, priests, etc.) and an increase in the complexity of their active power—experience and personality. New types of norms arise that regulate communication; human relationships are increasingly mediated by meanings and turn into relations of social roles. When the subjective side of activity is mediated and becomes an abstraction, the objective side also becomes an abstraction: things as means of activity become rights and duties. With the further division of the socio-cultural order, possession develops as a right of disposal, which is associated with the obligation to use. Possession complements and replaces application. If application is the disposal of a thing in the process of use, then possession is the disposal of the user, not tied to the process of use. This applies to both private and community possession.

The quantity of cultural bits contained in the subject and in the means of activity constitutes their meaning mass. The composition of meaning is the ratio between the mass of meanings contained in the subject (actor) and the mass of meanings contained in the means of activity. The mass of meanings in the activity itself depends on this ratio. The lower the meaning composition, the more complex the subject in relation to the means of activity, the smaller the mass of meanings in the means of activity relative to the mass of meanings in the subject—for example, if a skilled worker uses simple tools. And vica versa, the more complex the means of activity in relation to the subject, the greater the mass of cultural bits in things in relation to that in people, the higher the composition of meaning.

Forms of organization such as application and possession are characteristic of activities with a low composition of meaning, when an individual or a family is able to independently create or acquire the means necessary for the activity. The means here remain small, dwarfish by nature:

“Before capitalistic production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor—land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool—were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason they belonged, as a rule, to the producer himself” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 24, pp. 307-308).

However, possession presupposes more complex tools than application. The transformation of application into possession is associated with the complication of activity and its product and an increase in the rate of surplus activity. Application is widespread as long as the surplus product is insignificant and the means are no more than simple tools. As meanings increase, private appropriation of the surplus product develops. The more surplus product an individual or family can obtain, the more interested they are in organizing private production and securing their rights:

“But the vital thing is parcel labor as a source of private appropriation. It gives way to the accumulation of personal chattels, for example cattle, money and sometimes even slaves or serfs. This movable property, beyond the control of the commune, subject to individual exchanges in which guile and accident have their chance, will weigh more and more heavily on the entire rural economy. There we have the destroyer of primitive economic and social equality” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 24, p. 367).

As the surplus product grows, meanings accumulate and the composition of meaning becomes higher, possession replaces application. However, possession is still based on the labor of the immediate producer himself. Marx and Engels called possession “property based on one’s own labor”:

“Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labor, the other on the employment of the labor of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, pp. 751-752).

The growth of surplus product leads to the transformation of production for consumption and giving into commodity production based on money relations. Use value and exchange value as socially necessary multiplicity and mass of existence values find their way through the immense variety of individual opinions about required activities and products. The further production for exchange advances, the more money relations spread, the more added activity becomes added value, necessary activity becomes the value of active power and surplus activity becomes profit.

The surplus activity and its product represent the difference between the quantity of production and the quantity of consumption. Thus, the surplus product is the source of all accumulation. The higher the value of the surplus product, the greater the possibilities for saving and investing, i.e. making means of production. The rate of surplus activity determines the potential for accumulation of meanings. However, saving does not necessarily mean investing. The amount of investment is defined by expectations regarding the surplus activity and its product, i.e. profit.

The relationship between investment and surplus activity/product constitutes the essence of profit. Although profit arises in traditional society, here it is not yet the basis for the organization of self-reproduction and is thus completely random in nature. At this early stage, it is obvious that the source of profit is uncertainty. The primitive division of meanings and the low rate of surplus activity characteristic of subsistence economy limit the possibilities of making profit. Here, production is viewed as a means of consumption rather than as a means of exchange and profit:

“Aristotle insists on production for use as against production for gain as the essence of householding proper; yet accessory production for the market need not, he argues, destroy the self-sufficiency of the household as long as the cash crop would also otherwise be raised on the farm for sustenance, as cattle or grain; the sale of the surpluses need not destroy the basis of householding. … In denouncing the principle of production for gain as boundless and limitless, ‘as not natural to man;’ Aristotle was, in effect, aiming at the crucial point, namely, the divorce of the economic motive from all concrete social relationships which would by their very nature set a limit to that motive” (Polanyi 2001, pp. 56-57).

Possession emerges at a very low rate of surplus activity. At this stage, small possessors cannot yet achieve a sufficient rate of surplus activity to set in motion a cycle of expanded self-reproduction; the appropriation of surplus activity/product remains the prerogative of the state and the nobility, who collect the surplus and spend it on status consumption (palaces and temples) or large-scale structures and administration (irrigation systems, standing army, tax apparatus, etc.):

“At the time of the Spanish conquest the Texcoco, Chaco, and Xochimilco lakes had about 12,000 ha of chinampa fields. Their construction required at least 70 million man-days of labor. The average peasant had to spend no less than 200 days a year to grow enough food for his own family, so he could not work more than about 100 days on large hydraulic projects. As a good portion of this time had to be devoted to the maintenance of existing embankments and canals, seasonal labor of at least 60 and up to 120 peasants was needed to add 1 ha of a new chinampa. The means were different—but the pre-Hispanic basin of Mexico was clearly as much a hydraulic civilization as Ming China, its great Asian contemporary. Long-term, well-planned, centrally coordinated effort and an enormous expenditure of human labor were the key ingredients of its agricultural success” (Smil 2017, p. 99).

The complication of activity implies an increase in mediation, i.e. a growing mass of meanings materialized in the means of activity. A growing meaning mass per unit of product affects both the production of consumer articles and the making of means of production (investment). The prerequisite for increasing mediation is accumulation—saving surpluses and investing them in means of production. Accumulation implies that both the means of production and their making become more complex and the composition of meaning is higher. More complex means of production require broader cooperation and more sophisticated administration.

“Undoubtedly the most important, and lasting, contribution to intensified cropping in China was the design, construction, and maintenance of extensive irrigation systems. The antiquity of these schemes is best shown by the fact that nearly half of all projects operating by the year 1900 had been completed before the year 1500. The origins of perhaps the most famous one, Sichuan’s Dujiangyan, which still waters fields growing food for several tens of million people, go back to the third century BCE. … The construction and unceasing maintenance of such irrigation projects (as well as the building and dredging of lengthy ship canals) required long-range planning, the massive mobilization of labor, and major capital investment. None of these requirements could be met without an effective central authority. There was clearly a synergistic relationship between China’s impressive large-scale water projects and the rise, perfection, and perpetuation of the country’s hierarchical bureaucracies” (Smil 2020, pp. 93-94).

Investment is, by its definition, not production for consumption, since it is aimed at producing means of production and not consumer articles. The larger the investment, the less it is production for consumption and more it is production for exchange. Robert Lopez showed that although water mills were already used in antiquity, their relatively high cost meant that they did not spread in Europe until the Middle Ages, when slave labor was transformed into peasant labor. Greater freedom was a condition for greater efficiency. The deficit of slave labor forced the search for mechanical methods of grinding grain, while at the same time the lord of the manor forced the peasants to grind their grain in his mill. The shortage of rivers and streams to support waterwheels, in turn, led to the spread of windmills, which were not used in antiquity (Lopez 1976, pp. 43-44). An increase in meaning is an increase in mediation, the latter requires more freedom for the subjects, and more freedom requires a more complex socio-cultural order.