Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - The German Ideology: A new abridgement by Tom Whyman

In his introduction to his new abridgement of Marx and Engels' The German Ideology,Tom Whyman makes a point about the text itself. It is actually unclear whether it is a coherent work in itself. Whyman points out that there are two stories about it. The first is that its a 1846 text by Marx and Engels were they flesh out their thoughts and come to a "final reckoning with the 'philosophical tradition'" before leaving it to "the gnawing criticism of the mice", in Marx's words, and moving on. 

The second is that none of this is actually true. Rather the German Ideology was never really finished, and the bits that were, were a amalgam of Marx, Engels and other of their socialist friends, and then it was all "constructed" by Soviet Researchers in the 1920s. Whatever the reality, Whyman points out, The German Ideology is "a text of rare power: the rare sort of philosophical tract that, when you read it, can make you feel ecstatic with the rush of thinking, the bright brilliant naming and unlocking of the reality which is otherwise stuck inchoate all around you."

This is absolutely true. Re-reading the book I was struck by the absolute brilliance of Marx and Engels' insights as they, in contradiction to Hegel and the other thinkers they are critiquing, state their own positions on what we might today call Historical Materialism. It repays a re-read. 

I've reviewed The German Ideology before on this blog, the CJ Arthur abridgement, and I am interesting to note that I've highlighted many of the same passages. This work includes much more from the sections of the book that assault the ideas of Max Stirner. This poor fellow, similarly to Eugen Dühring is destined to go down in history as being remembered mostly as someone that Marx and Engels used to mercilessly attack in their exploration of their own ideas. But this is well deserved, as they say early on:

It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the realtion of their criticism to their own material surroundings. 

As the authors point out:

Life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself... Therefore in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore had an earthly basis for history and consequently never an historian.

A damning criticism of German philosophy.

Writing about the German Peasants' War and the Reformation recently, I was struck by the relevance of Marx and Engels' criticism of history in this format. So much writing about the 16th century begins from the premise that the Reformation took place, simply because Martin Luther had a brilliant idea and this idea mysteriously propagated. Luther did, of course, have an idea. As Marx himself said, the Reformation was "born in the brain of the monk". But why was it born then, and why did the idea take root in ways that similar ideas had not before? Not accepting the economic basis to the ideological superstructure in society means that one cannot comprehend how things change. As Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology this leaves historians without a materialist understanding adrift:

Thus, history becomes a mere history of illusory ideas, a history of spirits and ghosts, while the real, empirical history that forms the basis of this ghostly history is only utilised to provide bodies for these ghosts; from it are borrowed the names required to clothe these ghosts with the appearance of reality. 

In fact, even when someone like Stirner tries to be more specific, their failure to examine the actual reality of society, casts them adrift. As Marx and Engels say, for example:

He identifies first of all 'owning' as a private property-owner with 'owning' in gernal. Instead of examining the definite relations between private property and production, instead of examining 'owning' as a landed proprietor, as a rentier, as a merchant, as a factory-owner, as a worker - where 'owning' would be found to be a quite distinct kind of owning, control over other people's labour - he transforms all these relations into 'owning as such.'

This remarkable paragraph, which simultaneously skewers Stirner's crude comments and restates Marx and Engels' idea of capitalism as a system of class relations that determined by economic relations is a good example of the real value of The German Ideology, whether or not it exists as such!

Whyman claims that in making a new abridgement, he has felt confident, given the text's possibly history, to rearrange and reassemble to give new insights. He concludes:

This is first and foremost a popluar edition of The German Ideology, intended for interested students and lay people, as well as academics distant enough from Marx scholarship to feel able to simply dabble in his wriings: people who can feel free not to be completionist about a text, or to take some other authoritity's word for what is really important about it.

It should be said that Whyman has not just abridged the work. He has done so twice, abridging the work and then compressing it again for an even shorter and more accessible work. This permits him to make a neat dialectical joke about the most famous passage in the work.

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