ABSTRACT
The conflict between the East and the West, although it involves different ideologies, has little to do with different concepts of physical reality. The combination of bourgeois materialism and revolutionary Marxism which characterised early bolshevik philosophy reappears with victorious bolshevism as a combination of neo-capitalist practice and socialist ideology. Marxism, not being a theory of physical materialism and not bound to Newtonian determinism, is not affected by the new physics and microphysics. Marxism, for which knowledge of objective reality implies the indivisible inter-relationship between man, society and nature, does not bother with an 'objective reality' apart from that recognisable by men. While there is no connection between Marxism and physical determinism or indeterminism, there is also no real connection between the cold war and the different concepts of physical reality in the East and the West. The indeterminacy in quantum physics, though recognised, is explained as due to experimental techniques and not to a fundamental law of nature.
