“The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft. … The means by which a population is assembled and then made to produce a surplus is less important in this context than the fact that it does produce a surplus available to nonproducing elites. Such a surplus does not exist until the embryonic state creates it. Better put, until the state extracts and appropriates this surplus, any dormant additional productivity that might exist is ‘consumed’ in leisure and cultural elaboration. Before the creation of more centralized political structures like the state, what Marshall Sahlins has described as the domestic mode of production prevailed” (Scott 2017, pp. 171-172).
The ratio between surplus and necessary activity (and their products) forms the rate of surplus activity. The more the complexity of the culture-society exceeds the complexity of the individuals, the higher the rate of surplus activity.
Since, as we have seen above, Marx did not yet know and could not know that complex labor cannot in principle be reduced to simple labor, he could not have known either that added activity cannot be reduced to necessary activity. If for Marx surplus labor and surplus product were produced by the workers and other exploited classes, and appropriated by the exploiting classes, then from our point of view the surplus activity and its products are produced by culture-society as a whole, and the manner of their appropriation depends on the relative political, economic and cultural* power (or authority) of the state, social categories and individuals.
As long as the surplus product was redistributed for the benefit of officials and the army, states were satisfied with a vertical, i.e. centralized, calculation and accounting. The growth of crafts and cities led to a horizontal, i.e. decentralized, circulation of the surplus product. Surplus activity and the need to put its product into circulation were the driving force behind the long process of value and money development. Money spread where the surplus product was extracted from the immediate producers and transferred to an indefinite number of people through the mechanisms of competitive circulation.
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