p Historical materialism studies the laws governing the interrelation between matter and consciousness and the universal laws of being with respect to life in society.

p This does not mean, of course, that dialectical materialism does not study manifestations of the universal laws of the motion and development of matter in society. Dialectical materialism, faced with the task of studying the laws inherent in all the spheres of being, cannot avoid tracing how the latter function in social life. While studying the manifestations of these laws in society, however, dialectical materialism focusses its attention on only those elements, aspects and relationships that are common to all the other spheres of being. Historical materialism studies the functioning of the universal laws in social life in order to reveal their specific content, conditioned by the peculiarities of the social form of the motion of matter.

p By establishing the specific nature of the laws (studied by dialectical materialism) in social life, historical materialism discovers the general 286 laws which govern the functioning and development of human society.

p So, whereas dialectical materialism establishes the laws of interconnection of consciousness and matter in general by offering a solution to the basic question of philosophy, historical materialism, while dealing witii this problem as applied to society, reveals the laws of the interconnection between social being and social consciousness, the material and spiritual life of society. These lawgoverned patterns, though they are a manifestation of the general laws applying to the whole of reality, have their own specific content and hence are independent laws governing the operation of the social organism.

p In the context of historical materialism, such a general law as the law of the unity and “struggle” of opposites, for example, takes the form of that of class struggle in an antagonistic society, of that of the interconnection of production and consumption and of other laws of social development. The law of the transformation of quantitative into qualitative changes, when applied to society, takes the form of the law of social revolution and of other laws of qualitative transformation of various aspects of social life; the law of the negation of negation takes the form of the law of the replacement of socio-economic formations in the process of historical development and recurrence of past events at a higher stage taking place in all spheres of social life, and so on.

Thus, historical materialism studies the laws of interrelationship between matter and consciousness 287 and the general laws ot being in their specific manifestations in social life, and discovers, on this basis, the general laws governing the functioning and development ot society as a specific form ot the motion ot matter. Hence, the subject-matter ot historical materialism is the general laws governing the functioning and development ot society.