The Struggle "Mechanists versus Dialecticians" (1924-1929) - The Last Genuine Philosophical Debate
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Contenders
In the years between 1924 and 1929, a debate unfolded in Soviet philosophy that - for all its ideological distortions - touched on substantial philosophical questions. It concerned nothing less than the relationship between philosophy and natural science, the question of whether dialectics was an independent form of cognition or could be reduced to empirical methods.
On one side stood the Mechanists, whose most prominent representatives were Nikolai Bukharin and Lyubov Axelrod (called “Ortodoks”). Most Mechanists came from the natural sciences or were close to them. Their spokesman O. Minin had already, early on, issued the slogan: “Overboard with philosophy!” - together with religion. Natural science, the argument went, discovers its laws through empirical research. It needs no predetermined philosophical principles, no “dialectics” imposed on it from outside. The dialectical method of Marxism was, at bottom, nothing other than the scientific method itself.
On the other side stood the Dialecticians or Deborinists, led by Abram Deborin at the Communist Academy. Around them gathered the “Society of Militant Materialist Dialecticians,” supported by philosophers at the Lenin Institute, the Marx-Engels Institute, and the Institute of Red Professors. The Dialecticians insisted that philosophy was an independent discipline with its own method. Natural science depended on philosophical foundations that it could not itself establish. Dialectics was not merely “scientific method,” but the structure of reality itself - and this structure could not be captured through mechanical causal explanations.
The Contested Questions
The debate revolved around several interconnected questions:
First: Does philosophy have an independent justification for existing? The Mechanists denied this in principle. All philosophical problems would dissolve with the progress of natural science. The Dialecticians held against this: philosophy was necessary to understand the conditions of the possibility of scientific cognition. It could not be replaced by empirical inquiry, because empirical inquiry itself had philosophical presuppositions.
Second: Is there a “dialectics of nature”? The Mechanists tended to deny this question or dismiss it as speculative. Dialectics was at most applicable to history and society, not to nature. Bukharin, for instance, advocated a mechanistic concept of equilibrium: change arose through disturbance and restoration of equilibria - not through internal contradictions. The Dialecticians held against this that the latest developments in natural science - relativity theory, quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology - showed dialectical structures in nature itself. Dialectics was not a subjective method, but an objective form of movement.
Third: How is Hegel to be assessed? Here lay the deepest disagreement. The Mechanists tended to dismiss Hegel as a “superseded idealist.” Marx had transcended Hegel; the return to Hegel was a relapse into pre-Marxist thinking. The Dialecticians - here fully in the tradition of Plekhanov - insisted that Hegel was indispensable. Marx’s Capital could not be understood without Hegel’s Logic. Whoever ignored Hegel missed the core of Marxism.
Fourth: How is Spinoza to be classified? This seemingly marginal question gained surprising importance. Deborin followed his teacher Plekhanov in the thesis that Spinoza was a “materialist and dialectician” - a forerunner of dialectical materialism. The Mechanists considered Spinoza an “idealist metaphysician.” Behind this dispute lay the fundamental question: can there be a philosophical tradition of materialism, or is all materialism necessarily anti-philosophical?
The Course of the Debate
The debate began in the early 1920s as a rather academic affair, but grew sharper over the course of the decade. In 1925 the Dialecticians received important support: the Marx-Engels Institute published two significant fragmentary works - Engels’s Dialectics of Nature and parts of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. Both texts seemed to support the Dialecticians’ position.
In 1926 Deborin took over the editorship of Pod znamenem marksizma, which gave the Dialecticians an important institutional power base. The following years were marked by increasingly polemical confrontations in journals and at conferences.
The climax came in 1929 at the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist-Leninist Scientific Institutions. Deborin delivered the main address. A resolution was adopted that condemned Mechanism as heresy: it undermined dialectical materialism, substituted “vulgar evolutionism” for materialist dialectics and positivism for materialism. The Dialecticians had won.
But the victory was short-lived. Less than two years later, the victors themselves would become the vanquished.
Systematic Assessment: What Both Sides Missed
The debate between Mechanists and Dialecticians exemplifies the limits of Soviet philosophical discourse - but also its relative substance compared to what would follow.
The Mechanists were partly right: They recognized that Engels’s Dialectics of Nature was speculative - a philosophy of nature in the bad sense, which forced empirical findings into preconceived schemas. Their skepticism regarding the “dialectical” interpretation of relativity theory and quantum mechanics was justified. Many of these “dialectical” interpretations were pseudoscience.
They were also right in their warning against “philosophical dogmatism.” The danger that preconceived philosophical principles would obstruct empirical research was real - as would later be shown in Lysenkoism.
The Dialecticians were partly right: They recognized that philosophy cannot be replaced by natural science. The question of the conditions of the possibility of scientific cognition is itself not a scientific question. The mechanistic position was philosophically naive.
They also recognized the importance of Hegel. Later Marx research - especially after the publication of the Grundrisse - has confirmed their thesis that Marx’s method cannot be understood without Hegel.
What both missed: Both sides remained bound to the framework of “dialectical materialism,” but never seriously asked whether this framework itself was consistent. The question of how matter - as that which is utterly devoid of spirit - could be dialectical at all was never raised. The possibility that Hegel’s logic might be methodologically neutral - neither idealist nor materialist - was considered by neither side.
Both sides argued by appeal to authorities (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Plekhanov), instead of examining the arguments themselves. The ad hominem argument - “You are an idealist!” or “You are a vulgar materialist!” - increasingly replaced substantive engagement.
And both sides ignored the political dimension of their debate. In a system that made philosophy a matter of state, no philosophical debate could be “purely academic.” The victory of the Dialecticians in 1929 was not merely a victory of arguments - it was also an institutional shift of power that turned the losers into “heretics.”
The End of an Era
The Mechanist-Dialectician debate was the last genuine philosophical dispute in the Soviet Union for decades. It had touched on substantial questions that remain relevant to this day: the relationship of philosophy and science, the status of dialectics, the significance of Hegel for Marxism.
But it took place under conditions that made a genuine philosophical outcome impossible. The decision was reached not through the force of argument, but through institutional power - and this power would soon pass into entirely different hands. What appeared in 1929 as a victory of philosophical differentiation proved to be merely a prelude to the destruction of all differentiation.