Pannekoek and middle-class materialism

[OGG]

I've been reading Pannekoek's "Lenin as a Philosopher", and in Chapter 2, he discusses "middle-class materialism". From the notes at the beginning it states that the word used was actually, "bürgerlich", which translates to bourgeois, so maybe I should call it bourgeois. Regardless, I'm trying to wrap my head around the difference between historical materialism and bourgeois materialism. To my understanding, the bourgeois materialism rose as a reaction to feudalism, manifesting itself in the enlightenment. He goes on to give a little history of science, which I find interesting. Then he gets to a comparison of HM and BM. Now here's where I get a little confused. It seems that BM ignores the societal aspect of humans, concentrating instead on natural sciences. Is historical materialism the understanding of natural science applied to an analysis of human society?

Here's a link: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/ch02.htm

[Os Cangaceiros]

Have you heard of Julien Offray de La Mettrie? That's who I thought of when I read that. He was a 18th century materialist/determinist, probably most famous for "Man a Machine". They still talk about him in psychology/neuroscience classes. He also came from a bourgeois background apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Offray_de_La_Mettrie

[PhoenixAsh]

I've been reading Pannekoek's "Lenin as a Philosopher", and in Chapter 2, he discusses "middle-class materialism". From the notes at the beginning it states that the word used was actually, "bürgerlich", which translates to bourgeois, so maybe I should call it bourgeois. Regardless, I'm trying to wrap my head around the difference between historical materialism and bourgeois materialism. To my understanding, the bourgeois materialism rose as a reaction to feudalism, manifesting itself in the enlightenment. He goes on to give a little history of science, which I find interesting. Then he gets to a comparison of HM and BM. Now here's where I get a little confused. It seems that BM ignores the societal aspect of humans, concentrating instead on natural sciences. Is historical materialism the understanding of natural science applied to an analysis of human society?

Here's a link: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/ch02.htm


Technically he uses the dutch word "burgerlijk" ;) Which does have more or less the same meaning in this context.

The part where he explains the main difference is here:


Daarom beschouwt het historisch materialisme het werk van de wetenschap, zijn begrippen, inhoud, natuurwetten en krachten voornamelijk als e scheppingen van het geestelijk arbeiden van de mens, al danken zij hun ontstaan aan de natuur. Het burgerlijke materialisme, daarentegen, beschouwt dit alles, van wetenschappelijk standpunt gezien, als elementen van de natuur zelf, die door de wetenschap slechts ontdekt en aan het licht zijn gebracht. Natuuronderzoekers beschouwen de onveranderlijke substanties als materie, energie, elektriciteit, entropie enz. als de grondslagen van de wereld, als de werkelijkheid die moet worden ontdekt. Van het standpunt van het historisch materialisme zijn het producten die de scheppende hersenarbeid uit het gegeven van de natuurlijke verschijnselen vormt. Dit is één fundamenteel verschil in denken.

Where he indeed explains the first difference as the result of approach and therefore outcome.

HM sees science, its terminology and natural laws as the creation of labor of humans even though they exist within nature. BM sees them as the result of nature which is discovered by humans.

The difference is further explained in the preceding paragraphs. BM sees humans as a passive and observing reflection of the whole of reality merely describing what it discovers and a result of the natural laws themselves. Knowledge becomes the result of changing structures within the brain and science becomes a reflection of nature. This means that the natural law guides humans. Humans and society are the result of nature itself and the natural laws.

HM sees humans as the interpreting and changing actor within the whole or reality. Science is the result of the material conditions (society) in which the specific human lives which influences how they think and which in turn influences how society functions and how ideas (and science) are shaped.

So in HM the social structures and interactions are explained. In HM science is considered the outcome of those interactions.

[Hatshepsut]

In the Pannehoek selection, a significant sentence is “after all, ideas are different from bile and similar bodily secretions; mind cannot be considered as a form of force or energy, and belongs in a quite different category.” Yet the Enlightenment had countenanced mind-body duality beforehand, which can be done without a theology and is also a necessary underpinning for the belief that social rights are built into the structure of the universe, a thing natural science cannot show.

If bourgeois liberalism thought itself reliant on any form of materialism, a reaction against the “limitations of science” was inevitable. For if ideas flow from a chemical brain, “inalienable rights” supporting private property cannot follow—indeed, in biology, non-human organisms have never developed a rights system of any kind. Meaning the rights must be invented in response to social conditions like existence of private property in economic technology, as historical materialism predicts immediately even omitting dialectical methods: The information in those chemical brains is primarily social in character.

Pannehoek notes that reductionist categories only become problematic when one wishes to pass from science to epistemology, and from examining non-mental natural phenomena to examining the mind itself, where reductionism forbids the transformation of quantitative change into change of quality. In bourgeois materialism our minds remain only augmented animal minds; in historical materialism they become something different.

Historical materialism is not application of natural science to the study of society, however. It’s more phenomenological, without phenomenology’s denial that an external reality exists. HM views electrons not as things, but as ideas: The electron concept explains chemistry and electricity but doesn’t reify electrons. I can’t say why this is crucial, although HM has avoided the rut of bourgeois economists who feel that market laws derive from nature instead of society. :)