p While stressing the dependence of social consciousness on social being, historical materialism certainly does not reject the relative independence of social consciousness and the existence of intrinsic laws governing its development.

p Social being cannot explain the entire wealth of ideas and theories within a society. Entering each new stage of development, social consciousness takes with it certain ideas and theories from the previous stage. These become independent of the new developing social being and exist, as it were, on their own. For example, the emergence of socialist production in the Soviet Union radically changed the social being and social consciousness of the Soviet people. In Soviet society there are also, however, ideas dating to the remote past, which are not only out of keeping with socialist social being, but even contradict it. This applies in particular to religious ideas, which exist as vestiges of the past in the consciousness of certain individuals in Soviet society.

p This, however, does not mean that certain aspects in social consciousness are absolutely independent of social being. The independence of social consciousness is always relative. Individual ideas and outlooks may be independent of only the currently dominant historical conditions and historical being, but not of the material conditions of life in general.

p The relative independence of social consciousness is conditioned, first and foremost, by the fact 435 that ideas may survive the social being that directly engendered them, for social consciousness lags behind social being.

The relative independence of social consciousness is also the outcome of the interplay between the various forms of social consciousness which determines the presence of certain traits in a particular form of social consciousness and cannot be explained by the material conditions concerned. But even here the independence of the spiritual aspect of social life is only relative, for the interrelationship between different forms of social consciousness is also, in the final analysis, dependent on objective material factors.