Abram Moiseyevich Deborin

The distinctiveness of Deborin's philosophy lies in his interpretation of Spinoza, inherited from Plekhanov. Plekhanov held dialectical materialism to be 'a kind of Spinozism,' and Deborin made this proposition his lifelong philosophical task. For him, Spinoza was no mere precursor in the history of philosophy. The single-substance doctrine, 'God, or Nature,' advanced by the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher of Amsterdam was a system that closed the gap between mind and world and blocked off the very possibility of relativism and scepticism. Deborin found in it the prototype of the systematic rationality that Marxism needed, a point that echoed Trotsky's observation that Marx and Engels, though brilliant polemicists, were not systematic philosophers.

In 1927, attending the international conference in The Hague marking the 250th anniversary of Spinoza's death, Deborin, the Soviet delegate, was outraged to hear a League of Nations speaker package Spinoza as a thinker of peace compatible with Christianity. 'You are impudent liars,' he wrote inwardly. 'The contemporary proletariat is Spinoza's only genuine heir.' This was no mere academic dispute. It was a cultural struggle in which the Soviet state sought to appropriate the legitimacy of modern philosophy (through Spinoza) against Western bourgeois readings.

Yet this Spinozism carried a fatal difficulty. Spinoza's necessary universe was a static system; it contained no built-in dialectic of historical change and class struggle. Deborin's solution was to bring in Hegel: to fuse Spinoza's substance with Hegel's dialectical movement, thereby philosophically justifying the historical necessity culminating in proletarian revolution. It was precisely this, a philosophical disposition that elevated system over practice, and Spinoza and Hegel over Lenin, that became the real target of the 1931 'Menshevizing idealism' assault. After Deborin's fall, Spinoza did not vanish from Soviet philosophy. Later Marxists such as Louis Althusser and Evald Ilyenkov would each rethink the Spinoza-Marx connection in their own way, and at the starting point of those efforts lay Deborin's failed project.

Deborin's most important philosophical achievement was leading the dialectical camp in the 'mechanist vs. dialectician' debate that divided Soviet philosophy in the 1920s. The mechanists, natural scientists such as Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, Arkady Timiryazev, and Lyubov Akselrod, argued that all motion could be reduced to the transfer of physico-mechanical forces and that philosophy itself should be 'thrown overboard' (O. Minin's slogan). Bukharin's Historical Materialism (1921) gave this position theoretical backing through equilibrium theory. Deborin organized the dialectical response. In 1924 he founded the Society of Militant Materialist Dialecticians and rallied philosophers from the Communist Academy, the Institute of Red Professors, and the Marx-Engels Institute. The dialecticians held that the source of motion is not external impact but internal contradiction within things, and that dialectics is a universal methodology encompassing the natural sciences. The 1925 publication of Engels's Dialectics of Nature and Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks gave the dialectical camp decisive weapons. The watershed came at the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist-Leninist Academic Institutions in April 1929, where Deborin secured a resolution branding mechanism as anti-Marxist revisionism and establishing dialectical materialism as the official methodology of Soviet science and philosophy. This victory was the zenith of the Deborin school. Yet barely two years later, the same logic of deviation from orthodoxy would be turned against Deborin himself under the label 'Menshevizing idealism.'

The fall of the Deborin school began on 9 December 1930, when Stalin met with the party bureau of the Institute of Red Professors' philosophy and natural science section. It was there that Stalin first labelled Deborin's tendency 'Menshevizing idealism.' The qualifier 'Menshevizing' charged that the Deborinites had revived Menshevism's original sin, the separation of theory from practice, while 'idealism' attacked their alleged conflation of Hegel's idealist dialectics with Marx's materialist dialectics. On 25 January 1931, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) adopted a resolution on the journal Under the Banner of Marxism, removing Deborin from the editorship and from the directorship of the Institute of Philosophy he had founded. The assault was led by young philosophers Mark Mitin and Pavel Yudin, with Vladimir Milyutin and Evgeny Pashukanis directing the offensive from the Presidium of the Communist Academy. The core indictment was twofold: first, the Deborin school refused to recognize the 'Leninist stage' of Marxism, treating Lenin as a mere practitioner and Plekhanov as the true theorist; second, they denied the partisanship (partiinost') of philosophy. The campaign marked the full politicization of Soviet philosophy, its 'Bolshevization', and installed the Mitin-Yudin alliance as the new philosophical leadership. That Deborin survived when so many perished in the Moscow trials owed much to the institutional foundations he had built and, controversially, to political accommodation. It would take twenty-five years, and his 1956 meeting with Mikoyan, before the condemnation was effectively rescinded.