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. 307-8).

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. 751-2).

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. 56-7).