Universal Intercourse
Description
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
"In one of his early works, The German ideology (1845), Marx remarks on how capital creates what he—quaintly to modern ears—refers to as “universal intercourse”—or, in the original German, verkehr.[3] Verkehr is a complex term with compound connotations of traffic, transportation, exchange, communications and commercial dealing (Bost 2015). For Marx, it identifies the combination of communication and transportation, media and mobility, integral to the transactions of money, labour and resources required and enabled by capitalism’s world-market.
As is not unusual in the treatment of capital by the young Marx, his discussion of “universal intercourse” is at once celebratory and critical. Verkehr is presented as force that breaks down parochialisms and localisms, emancipates humanity from feudal constraints and opens the way to fuller realization of its “species-being”. But the enthusiasm abruptly stops. Verkher’s emancipatory course, Marx cryptically declares, continues up to a point. Then it becomes “intolerable.” What converts universal intercourse from liberatory force to oppressive imposition is not immediately spelled out. But the overall argument of The German ideology, and of Marx’s work as a whole, leaves little doubt as to the cause. What makes verkehr an “intolerable power” is its distortion by the limits of the very order that unleashed it-- the collision between commodification and universality, profit and freedom. Today, universal intercourse’s fusion of media and mobility incarnates in “mobile media”; the contemporary instantiation of verkehr is the smart phone, the to-hand moonshot-calculation-capable computer, operating systems courtesy of Google or Apple, portal to Facebook, Amazon and the rest of platform capitalism. And today, as we saw, even members of capital’s political establishment feel, or at least feel compelled to pretend they feel, that the oligopolistic private ownership of today’s universal networks has to some degree become “intolerable”.
What the young Marx discusses as “universal intercourse” is in his later works, such as Grundrisse and Capital, developed in more abstract terms through the concept of “circulation”. "