Deborin School

Also known as "Dialectical School". The main representative of the school were A. M. Deborin, as well as N. A. Karev, I. K. Luppol and Y. E. Stens.

In the 1920s, a trend of philosophical nihilism and mechanistic thinking emerged in the Soviet Union. Ithad a considerable impact, which was greatly hindering the influence and the guiding role of Marxist philosophy on the natural science circles, and was also extremely harmful to the spread and study of Marxist philosophy and Lenin's philosophical ideas. A group of "dialecticians" led by Deborin criticized this mechanistic trend, which broke out the first great polemic in the history of Soviet Philosophy. In 1925, Stepanov published an article titled “Engels and the Mechanistic View of Nature” on Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, in which he justified his views by describing Engels as a mechanist. In response to Stepanov's article, Deborin wrote an artitle titled “Engels and the Dialectical View of Nature”, which refuted the mechanistic views in Stepanov's article, especially his misinterpretation of Engels' views. Deborin pointed out that Stepanov and his colleagues actually abandoned dialectical materialism, and their views were the metaphysical mechanism criticized by Engels in Dialectics of Nature.

As the debate continued, there were profound disagreements over whether materialistic dialectics can exist as an independent science, whether natural science should be guided by materialistic dialectics, what is the relationship between philosophy and natural sciences, whether the basic laws of nature's movement are mechanical or dialectical, and what is the relationship between necessity and contingency. In his closing speech of the debate on May 18, 1926, Deborin defined the mechanistic school as a revisionist school, while his school as a revolutionary and orthodox Marxist, thus giving the polemic a distinct political dimension and sharpening the confrontation between the two sides. It was not until 1929 that this protracted polemic ended with the overall victory of the Deborin school.