The Deborin School - The Most Differentiated Marxist Interpretation of Hegel in the Early Soviet Period
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Abram Deborin: Biography of a Boundary-Crosser
Abram Moiseevich Deborin - his real name was Joffe - was born in 1881 in Kovno (today Kaunas, Lithuania) into a poor Jewish family. He learned the plumbing trade before, at sixteen, getting involved in illegal Marxist circles. In 1903 he went into exile and studied at the philosophical faculty of the University of Bern, where he befriended Georgi Plekhanov - that “father of Russian Marxism” who had made the connection between Hegel, Spinoza, and Marx his program.
This connection shaped Deborin’s entire intellectual development. From Plekhanov he took over the conviction that Marxism could not be understood without Hegel, that dialectics was more than a “method” - namely, the structure of reality itself -, and that Spinoza should be appreciated as a forerunner of dialectical materialism. These positions would later become his undoing.
Politically Deborin was a man of the center, which in revolutionary times is the most dangerous position. From 1907 to 1917 he sympathized with the Mensheviks, then remained without party affiliation for years. Only in 1928 - when his philosophical position was already established - did he join the Bolshevik party. This late entry made him permanently suspect in the eyes of the hardliners: a “Menshevik” who had converted, but was never quite “one of us.”
The Journal Pod znamenem marksizma and the Deborin School
From 1926 Deborin was editor-in-chief of the journal Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism) - the most important philosophical organ of the Soviet Union. This position gave him enormous influence over the direction of Soviet philosophy. Around him gathered a group of talented philosophers: Ivan Luppol, Nikolai Karev, Grigori Bammel, Jan Sten, and others. They became known as “Deborinists” or “Dialecticians” - in contrast to the “Mechanists,” with whom they engaged in a years-long debate.
What distinguished the position of the Deborin school? Three basic convictions:
First, Deborin insisted on the independence of philosophy as a discipline. Philosophy could not simply be replaced by natural science. It had its own method, its own problems, its own contribution to knowledge. This position was directed against the Mechanists, who declared philosophy superfluous - “overboard with philosophy!” one of their spokesmen, O. Minin, had demanded.
Second, Deborin defended the dialectics of nature against mechanistic reduction. Natural science itself, he argued, discovered dialectical structures - in the theory of relativity, in quantum mechanics, in evolutionary biology. These structures could not be captured by simple causal laws. Dialectics was not merely a “method” applied to nature from outside - it was inherent in nature itself.
Third - and here lay the real scandal - Deborin emphasized the indispensability of Hegel. Marxism could not be understood without Hegel. The dialectical method was not Marx’s invention, but Hegel’s discovery - Marx had “merely” turned it materialistically. Whoever did not know Hegel could not truly grasp Marx.
Deborin’s Introduction to the Hegel Edition (1929)
This position found its clearest expression in Deborin’s introduction to the first volume of the Soviet complete edition of Hegel: “Hegel and Dialectical Materialism” (1929). The text shows both the strengths and the limits of the Deborin school.
Deborin formulated the necessity that philosophy be science - a science that differs from and transcends empirical natural science: “Natural science is impossible without philosophy,” he wrote, invoking Lenin. Dialectics, Deborin continued, is “for natural science the most correct form of thinking” (Engels).[1]
At the same time, Deborin criticized Hegel’s idealism. Hegel’s thesis that the categories were “the essence of things themselves, reality, the substance of the world” was unacceptable to Deborin. “Although we think in concepts,” he wrote, “it does not follow that the concept is the essence of the world. Concepts are forms of our apprehension of the world… Logic (or philosophy) is the grammar of science.”[2]
This formulation is revealing. It shows that Deborin stood closer to a Kantian rationalism than to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Dialectics was for him a form of thought that adapted thinking to the movement of matter - but not a structure of reality itself. This position was philosophically more sophisticated than the crude materialism of the Mechanists. It preserved the relative autonomy of thought. But it missed Hegel’s central insight: that the distinction between “form of thought” and “reality” is itself a determination of thought that must be overcome.
Systematic Assessment: Strengths and Limits
The Deborin school deserves a differentiated appraisal, which is neither hagiography nor condemnation.
What the Deborinists correctly recognized:
They understood that dialectics cannot be reduced to “natural laws.” The mechanistic position, which wanted to replace philosophy with natural science, was a regression behind the current state of knowledge. The Deborinists defended - against the spirit of the age - the independence of philosophical thinking.
They recognized the importance of Hegel for understanding Marx. While the Mechanists dismissed Hegel as “superseded,” the Deborinists insisted that Marx could not be understood without Hegel. This position was later confirmed by the Grundrisse and the Philosophical Notebooks.
They preserved a level of philosophical discussion that was lost after their condemnation. Their texts show conceptual differentiation, argumentative care, familiarity with the sources - qualities that disappeared in Stalinist philosophy.
What the Deborinists missed:
They remained bound to the materialist presupposition. The question of whether the logic should be interpreted “idealistically” or “materialistically” was not treated as a question that the logic itself had to decide - but as a question already decided before the logic. This dogmatic stipulation prevented a genuine understanding of what Hegel meant by “absolute idealism.”
They underestimated the political dimension of their position. In a system that made philosophy a matter of state, a differentiated interpretation of Hegel was not simply an academic option - it was a political statement. The emphasis on Hegel’s independence could be read as questioning the Marxist “overcoming” of him. The defense of philosophy against natural science could appear as an attack on the “scientific character” of Marxism.
They were not self-reflective enough. Their position should have raised the question: how can we be certain that our interpretation of Hegel is correct? What if the “materialist inversion” itself rests on a misunderstanding? These questions were not asked - partly out of dogmatic blindness, partly out of political caution.
The Tragic Potential
The Deborin school represents a tragic potential in the history of Marxism. It contained elements that could have led to a genuine appropriation of Hegel - an appropriation that would not have “overcome” Marxism, but would have deepened it. The emphasis on the independence of logic, the defense of dialectics against mechanistic reduction, the insistence on the indispensability of Hegel - all this pointed in a direction that would later be taken up again by philosophers such as Evald Ilyenkov.
But this potential was never realized. Political circumstances prevented it. The condemnation of the Deborin school in 1931 ended not only a philosophical position - it ended the possibility of serious philosophical discussion in the Soviet Union for decades. What followed was dogmatism without dialectics.