Mechanists (Soviet philosophy)

What did Soviet philosophers fight about after the revolution?

After 1917 Marxism became the official world view of the state, yet it was not settled what "Marxist philosophy" was actually supposed to do. Marx left no philosophical system; there were only the outlines written by Engels and Plekhanov and Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Soviet philosophers of the 1920s therefore split over a very basic question. Is philosophy limited to summing up what physics, chemistry and biology have found, or is it an independent discipline studying general laws that the sciences cannot answer by themselves?

In "On the Significance of Militant Materialism", sent to the philosophical journal Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism) in 1922, Lenin asked for two things at once: the journal must "draw natural scientists into this work", and its editors must become "a society of materialist friends of Hegelian dialectics". For Lenin these were a single task; after his death they became the banners of two camps. Those who put the weight on natural science were called "mechanists", those who put it on the study of Hegel "dialecticians". The debate began in 1924 in theoretical journals such as Bolshevik and Pod znamenem marksizma and in books.

привлекать к этой работе в философском журнале естествоиспытателей

«обществом материалистических друзей гегелевской диалектики»

The spark was a posthumous manuscript of Engels. The Dialectics of Nature, which Engels had left unfinished in the 1870s and 1880s, appeared complete for the first time in Moscow in 1925, in the German original with a Russian translation. Engels wrote there that the laws of dialectics are "abstracted from the history of nature and of human society" and reduced them to three: the law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa, the law of the interpenetration of opposites, and the law of the negation of the negation. The book was read as proof that dialectics operates in nature itself, and the question became whether natural scientists had to learn dialectics, or whether dialectics was just another name for what science was already doing.

Es ist also die Geschichte der Natur wie der menschlichen Gesellschaft, aus der die Gesetze der Dialektik abstrahiert werden.

What did the mechanists argue?

Those grouped as mechanists included Lyubov Axelrod (Ortodoks), Alexander Varyash, Vladimir Sarabyanov, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov and Arkady Timiryazev. They interpreted Marxist philosophy as a doctrine extending the laws of the natural sciences to every field of being and thought. The words of Skvortsov-Stepanov, an Old Bolshevik who had translated Capital into Russian and led the camp, sum up the view: "For Marxists there exists no domain of some kind of 'philosophising' separate and isolated from science, with some supposedly special 'specific methods of research' of its own." He even wrote an article titled "The Dialectical Understanding of Nature Is the Mechanistic Understanding".

Для марксистов не существует области какого-то «философствования», отдельной и обособленной от науки, с какими-то своими, будто бы особыми, «специфическими методами исследования».

"Mechanism" sounds like a term of abuse, but what they meant to defend was the explanatory method of modern science: life can ultimately be explained by chemistry and physics, and differences of quality by differences in the quantity and motion of particles. On this view "quantity turns into quality" is merely another way of describing what science measures and calculates, and to lay Hegel's concepts over it is metaphysics imposing laws on nature from outside science. Some of them openly repeated the positivist thesis that "science is its own philosophy". The physicist Timiryazev rejected relativity and quantum mechanics as idealism for the same reason.

«Наука — сама себе философия»

In politics Nikolai Bukharin was regarded as their ally. In his Theory of Historical Materialism (1921) Bukharin explained the relation between society and nature as a process of equilibrium disturbed and restored; his critics saw this as a mechanistic "theory of equilibrium" that explained development by the clash of external forces rather than by contradictions inside things, and traced it to the influence of Alexander Bogdanov. Bukharin himself did not call himself a mechanist. Lyubov Axelrod was a pupil of Plekhanov who had attacked Machists such as Bogdanov before Lenin did, earning the pen name Ortodoks, "the orthodox one". The mechanist camp consisted not of newcomers but of people who had been defending materialism since before the revolution.

How did the Deborinites answer?

The centre of the opposing camp was Abram Deborin, Plekhanov's pupil and from 1926 editor-in-chief of Pod znamenem marksizma. His pupils, such as Nikolai Karev, Ivan Luppol, Jan Sten and Grigory Bammel, gathered around him, and Vladimir Adoratsky and Emelyan Yaroslavsky also joined in criticising mechanism. For them Marxist philosophy was not the same as the conclusions of natural science but a discipline with its own status and specific content, namely the categories of dialectics obtained by rereading Hegel's Logic in a materialist way.

Relying on Engels's Anti-Dühring and the newly published Dialectics of Nature, the Deborinites argued that the laws of dialectics can be found in nature. When the mechanists rejected philosophy in the name of science, the Deborinites turned the latest science, relativity and quantum mechanics, against them: the mechanists' conception of nature was too narrow, for was it not modern physics itself that showed the world could not be explained by the particles and forces of classical mechanics alone? There was also a quarrel over Spinoza. The mechanists held him to be an idealist metaphysician; Deborin, following his teacher Plekhanov, saw him as a materialist and a dialectician.

The debate was no calm academic discussion. Both sides stopped at nothing, accusing each other of idealism, revisionism, liquidationism, scholasticism, eclecticism, anti-Marxism and philosophical helplessness. The language in which a philosophical question is translated straight into a question of loyalty to the party was already in use.

What was decided in 1929, and what came after?

In April 1929 the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist-Leninist Scientific Research Institutions adopted a resolution closing the criticism of mechanism. It declared that this current, "in fact substituting vulgar evolutionism for revolutionary-materialist dialectics and positivism for materialism", was blocking the entry of the method of dialectical materialism into natural science and "represents a plain departure from Marxist-Leninist philosophical positions". The same year Deborin became a full member of the Academy of Sciences and the first director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Communist Academy. The studies cited by the Russian Wikipedia judge that the Deborinites won less by the force of their arguments than by the administrative levers they held.

подменяя на деле революционно-материалистическую диалектику вульгарным эволюционизмом, а материализм — позитивизмом

это течение представляет явный отход от марксистско-ленинских философских позиций.

1929 was also the year Bukharin was branded a "Right deviationist" and pushed out of the Politburo. Mechanism in philosophy was attacked together with the Right Opposition in politics, and the Deborinites' victory did not last. On 9 December 1930 Stalin met the bureau of the party cell of the philosophy and natural science department of the Institute of Red Professors and spoke of the "struggle on two fronts" in philosophy; out of that meeting came the label "Menshevizing idealism" aimed at the Deborinites. After the Central Committee's resolution of 25 January 1931 on Pod znamenem marksizma, Deborin was removed from the leadership of the Institute of Philosophy, and Mark Mitin and Pavel Yudin became the new leaders of Soviet philosophy. Mechanism now counted as the Right deviation, and Menshevizing idealism as the other deviation paired with it.

The mechanists' fates differed. Skvortsov-Stepanov died of illness in October 1928 and was buried in the Kremlin wall, so he never saw the condemnation. Lyubov Axelrod, classed in the early 1930s among the "so-called mechanists", fell into oblivion; her last book appeared in 1934 and she died in 1946. Deborin's pupil Jan Sten was shot in 1937.

What did the debate leave to Soviet philosophy?

As the Russian Wikipedia puts it, after this debate the possibility of philosophical research independent of official dogma practically vanished in the Soviet Union. Stalin ended philosophical questions by decision rather than discussion, and in 1938, in Chapter Four, section 2 of the Short Course, "On Dialectical and Historical Materialism", he reduced dialectics to four features, each opening with the formula "Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard nature as a state of rest and immobility…". The "critique of metaphysics" that the mechanists had used as a weapon had become the sentence pattern of a state textbook. At the same time the negation of the negation, one of Engels's three laws, was dropped from this formulation; leaving out the most Hegelian of the laws can also be read as a sign that the Hegel studies the Deborinites had laboured over were no longer welcome.

В противоположность метафизике диалектика рассматривает природу не как состояние покоя и неподвижности

Official Soviet histories of philosophy described the debate as the victory of Leninist dialectics on "two fronts", against mechanism and against idealism. Researchers such as Yehoshua Yakhot, whose The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR appeared in emigration in 1981, and Alexander Ogurtsov in the perestroika years see it instead as the first stage in the suppression of philosophical thought. Deborin himself, asking Anastas Mikoyan in 1956 to lift the label from him, laughed that he had "been trying for 25 years to understand what that is, and still haven't".

вот уже 25 лет стараюсь понять, что это такое, да так и не понял

Still, the question the debate raised did not end in the 1920s. Whether philosophy must follow the conclusions of science or lead it came back in its worst form in Lysenkoism in 1948, when philosophy acted as umpire in a biological dispute, and it was a starting point again when Evald Ilyenkov's generation took up dialectical logic after the Thaw. For anyone asking what philosophy can add to science and what it must not impose on it, the debate remains a case that shows the failures of both sides. The entry "Menshevizing idealism" in this dictionary covers the condemnation of the Deborinites in 1930–31; this entry covers the earlier debate between mechanists and dialecticians.