Page 11 - Changing Living Spaces

An Introduction to the Living Spaces Concept

In the mid-nineteenth century, Marx and Engels used the multi-lay-
ered German term ‘Verkehr,’ which in the German-speaking world in the
eighteenth century originally meant service and transportation of mate-
rials but evolved into a universal meaning of social contact and dealings,
from which the usage of the word to mean sexual intercourse or an asso-
ciation to be established was derived, eventually including the definition
‘traffic’. This term, translated simply as ‘intercourse’ in the following pas-
sages in English, may symbolize an economically oriented social change
in the nineteenth century. However, such a controversial argument is be-
yond the scope and role of this discussion chapter (Karatani 2012).
After describing the German Ideology from 1845 to 1846, Marx and
Engels tended not to use the term ‘Verkehrsverhältnisse’ (‘modes of ex-
change’) which covered material exchange and human intercourse, e.g.
physical-material/mental-cultural production/exchange and species’ re-
production in the single concept of ‘Verkehr’, but only the concept of
‘Produktionsverhältnisse’ (‘modes of production’), or economic relations
of capitalistic production, in order to identify the fundamental problem of
capitalism, which was their main issue in line with the Communist Manifesto.
This may mark the beginning of the Age of Economy. However, in this book,
which takes a broad approach to economic and environmental history, we
should be reminded of the following original message of Marx and Engels.
Die Produktion der Ideen, Vorstellungen, des Bewußtseins ist zu-
nächst unmittelbar verflochten in die materielle Thätigkeit & den
materiellen Verkehr der Menschen, Sprache des wirklichen Lebens.
Das Vorstellen, Denken, der geistige Verkehr der Menschen erschei-
nen hier noch als direkter Einfluß ihres materiellen Verhaltens.
[Marx and Engels 2017, 135]

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first
directly interwoven with the material activity and the material in-
tercourse of men — the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking,
the mental intercourse of men at this stage still appears as the di-
rect efflux of their material behaviour. [Marx and Engels 1976, 42]
Production methods in Japan are thought to have changed dramati-
cally under the influence of Euro-American industrialization in the lat-
er nineteenth century with the introduction of machinery and fossil
fuels. In agriculture, the economy of large-scale farmers began to devel-
op, especially in Hokkaido. However, the economy of small farmers did

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