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The German Ideology: An Interview with Tom Whyman

Tom Whyman interviewed by Matt Colquhoun.

 

Matt Colquhoun: Tom, you’ve just published a new abridgement of Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology with Repeater Books. Apart from perhaps its most famous passage — ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,’ which is now known for being inscribed on Marx’s tomb in London — it doesn’t seem to be an oft-cited work outside of academia. What was it that made you want to edit this new edition of the work, and why do you think it warrants revisiting today?

Tom Whyman: Actually that quote is from ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which is a fragment Marx wrote around the same time. Although I do include it in my abridgement of The German Ideology — as the most condensed abridgement of the work possible. Clearly the two texts are related — but from a wonkish Marxological perspective, they’re not the same (though the original editors of The German Ideology could easily have incorporated the ‘Theses’ into the Feuerbach chapter, I think).

But actually that speaks to my motivations for producing this new abridgement. Marx’s ideas are hugely exciting and hugely relevant to our world; of all the great philosophers, he’s arguably the funniest, and he should be read very widely indeed — he can be difficult to understand, but he is by no means a chore to read. But Marx’s output was hugely disparate, a lot of what we have of his work (including The German Ideology) is in a less-than-complete form and was only published posthumously — even Capital, Vol. 1, the great big work that he actually completed, he used to tell people to read in a different order to the one it was published in. This, along with a pedantry that anyway tends to infect the organised left (sorry guys) has made Marx’s work even easier than that of most thinkers to gate-keep.

I wanted to open up a bit of Marx to a wider audience. The German Ideology is an especially conflicted text as a result of its editorial history, including its recent editorial history (you’ll get Marx scholars claiming it doesn’t exist), and the bulk of it consists of a very long chapter on Max Stirner, which in its original form has brilliant moments but is borderline unreadable. I’ve gotten huge amounts out of engaging with, and teaching, The German Ideology over the years, and really I wanted to find a way of presenting that to people.

Really though beyond all that, the reason why The German Ideology in particular is worth reading today is that in it, Marx takes the Idealist tradition he was raised in and shows us how to turn it into something politically vital. He takes Thought out of the academy, and shows us how it is grounded in life as lived. In this he sets thought to work, as something that ought to be aimed at the radical overthrow of all the ‘existing conditions’ which oppress us, which fail to allow us to exist as the liberated subjects the Idealists took us to be.

We live in conditions right now where very urgent action is required to prevent the destruction of the species and the planet, and also most ‘radical’ thought exists within constraints that are incredibly scholastic. The German Ideology helps us re-think philosophy as the sort of discipline that, imo, we need it to be today.

MC: Amelia Horgan, on the back of the book’s cover, rightly describes this edition as a ‘much-needed popular’ one. It is certainly a bold and creative abridgement, which makes this valuable work more accessible for a much-wider audience. As you write in the introduction, you wanted to provide ‘the reader with the tightest exposition of Marx and Engels’ materialist philosophy of history possible’. How did you start this process? And what do you think the virtues are of making this unruly (and notably unfinished) philosophical text into a more pop-philosophical one?

TW: My method was basically to assemble the text as I would have liked it to be if I was teaching it myself — so actually there ended up being creative work involved throughout, in terms of how I presented it, as well as in incorporating my own commentary. Perhaps this sounds wanky but this ‘abridgement’ is as much a book about Marx — and about my own response to Marx — as it is a book by Marx. It’s a collaboration between me and Marx — like if one of Beethoven’s symphonies or whatever was re-configured by, you know, Some Guy.

As to the virtues of doing this — I suppose I’m not interested in Marx as a thinker to ‘get right’, in the cold way that historians of philosophy might try to get a thinker’s ideas ‘right’. I don’t think Marx himself would want this — indeed, the disparate and unfinished character of his work means that he is someone who we have very little of the considered, final thoughts of. I think Marx is most useful as a conversational partner, as someone whose perspective on his own time can help us to figure out the contradictions and opportunities of our own. I wanted to transform this book into something that can better function in this way.

MC: One of the most striking things about this work is how we are introduced to a different Marx and Engels — not simply the diligent diagnosticians of Capital but two fiercely political thinkers who deploy often deeply sarcastic retorts to critics of the communist project, particularly, in this instance, Max Stirner. There’s great humour and fury in it, illustrated by the rendering of Marx and Engels as Punch and Judy on the cover. I wonder how you see this more argumentative text today, in an era that is defined by culture-war debates of another kind? Is this ferocity something the left should reconnect with?

TW: Are the left not ferocious right now? I think actually the left are very good at being angry — if not at the right, then certainly at each other. Marx and Engels actually speak to this — a lot of their arguments with the thinkers they discuss are really pretty fine-grained, but they are put in openly polemical terms. German philosophy after Kant often has the feel of a forum in the pre-social media Golden Age of Forums: just a bunch of guys constantly mad at each other over their slightly different takes on their dominant special interest. Marx and Engels would have been among the greatest posters there ever were.

But of course posting is not enough. The German Ideology is very good at showing us how thought might be better related to life — but in this sense, it’s really the antidote to a certain sort of scholastic radical philosophy. As to Poster’s Disease — to getting offline and refusing to tilt at the windmills of whoever happens to be the Main Character of the day… maybe Marx and Engels can’t help us here. They would probably have fallen prey to it themselves.

MC: This new project follows on from your other recent book, Infinitely Full of Hope, in which you approach the philosophy of Immanuel Kant through your experience of fatherhood. Specifically, you approach Kant’s key philosophical question, ‘What can I hope for?’ The German Ideology, in your hands, is also transformed into an explicitly hopeful, even confident work. With that in mind, what do you hope new and old readers of The German Ideology will take from this new edition, faced as we are with a world in which Marxism, and leftist political philosophy more generally, often finds itself under increasingly cynical attack?

TW: Hopefully, I’ve spoken to some of this in my answers to the previous questions — how The German Ideology can be the antidote to a particular mode of philosophising. As to anything else — it’s not a cure-all. But I am basically an Adornian and, while I don’t think thought spins frictionless of material conditions, I do think thought can work, in some cases, powerfully against them — if nothing else, by allowing us to conceive alternative possibilities for action. Better philosophy is good for everyone (hopefully, maybe).

Beyond that… I don’t know. I’d love to be one of those pop-left thinkers who can swagger about claiming, perhaps even honestly since on George Costanza grounds ‘it’s not a lie if you believe it,’ that reading their book is going to help inspire the mass movement we need to finally set everything right and save the planet and live like gods. Marx and Engels are closer to that than me — but part of the reason I wrote a book on hope was that I often find it so difficult to feel it. Philosophical inquiry tends to be quite trivial unless you’ve really got something personally at stake.

We live in this world, and we work, and we try to contribute in some way that makes things better, ideally, we try and be good people — which also means being good political actors, not just being good people in some private way, where God would deem us worthy of admission into the kingdom of heaven. That’s what I hoped to do with this little book, I guess.

MC: As a final question, what can we expect from you next? Are you working on anything right now that you’re excited about?

TW: I’m pivoting to writing mysteries, under the name of J.D. McGregor. That or I’d like to write a memoir that’s also a book about The Simpsons.

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ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Tom Whyman is a philosopher and writer who lives in the north east of England. He has taught at a number of UK universities, and was a contributing writer to The Outline. He is the author of Infinitely Full of Hope (Repeater, 2021) and has edited the new abridgement of Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology (Repeater, 2022).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Matt Colquhoun is a writer and photographer from Kingston-Upon-Hull, UK. They are the author of Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher, editor of Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher.

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