Heidegger on Marx

The question posed to Heidegger in this clip was (as recounted by the person who posted this on YouTube): "do you think philosophy has a social mission?" Heidegger answers no, saying (I paraphrase) that we have to ask what society is--the question of its being. Insofar as this is the question, we cannot say that philosophy can have a social mission in the sense that "social mission" is understood as a mission that does not interrogate or just excludes the question of society's being.

The portion that we get in this clip then shows us that if we are to mean anything by "social mission" we also have to (according to Heidegger) interrogate how the being of society is something that changes or can transform itself--which is the supposed goal of any "social mission." Heidegger then turns to Marx as the representative advocate of a philosophy of Weltveränderung--of "world-changing" through something like a social mission, and then tries to show how Marx both looks into and cannot see the necessity of this interrogation. I am posting this because it is heard superficially as a condemnation or "rebuttal" of Marx--indeed this is how the person who posted it (who is a bit of an asshole) characterizes it.

But, if we really hear what Heidegger is saying, if we really pay attention to why he picks up the writings of Marx and reads from them, word for word, we can see that this is more than any mere "refutation." It is a meditation on the words in the sentence (from Marx's "Thesen"): "Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kömmt darauf an, sie zu verändern." More specifically, it is a meditation of the meaning of the word Veränderung, change, transformation, alteration, more literally something like be-othering, or going-through-nexting, and how it is related to Vorstellung, representation, and interpretieren, interpretation. Above all, it is an attempt to account for how we should go about reading words that call for undergoing othering, that call for Veränderungen in a way that can only be cited (and moreover, cited materially, by picking up a book). This said, we can see a little clearer why this would have to be a problem for Heidegger, or why he would have to say that the second part of this sentence (the part with the call for alteration, change, or transformation) would have to be contrary to the first. So, with all of this noted, let's translate what Heidegger says (with the help of the poster's translation)--and I'll just note here that I'm provisionally translating Veränderung as "alteration" in order to bring out the othering (in Latin, alterno, alternare) in it:

...the question of the demand for an alteration of the world brings us back to Karl Marx's often quoted statement from his "Theses on Feuerbach." I would like to quote it exactly and read out loud: "philosophers have only differently interpreted the world, what it comes down to is that it be altered." When this statement is cited and when it is looked at, it is overlooked that altering the world presupposes an alteration in the representation of the world. A representation of the world can only be altered by adequately interpreting the world.
That means: Marx's demand for an "alteration" is founded upon on a very certain [or determinate] interpretation of the world, and because of this, this statement is shown to be without weight. It gives the impression that it speaks decisively against philosophy, though the second half of the statement presupposes, unspoken, a demand for philosophy.