ABSTRACT
Soviet ideology stressed two dimensions of Marxism: historical materialism, a theory of social development; and dialectical materialism, a philosophy of science. Dialectical materialism did not argue for the crude reduction of all things to physical particles; rather, it suggested, matter has evolved through various stages and qualitative transformations to produce different levels of being. By this argument, physics, biology, and the social sciences, representing different spheres of being, have their own distinct laws. Thus the distinctive nature of human society was preserved without destroying the materialist worldview (Graham 1993: 100–3).
