4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the social struggle. The social consciousness of any given power is not a passive spectator of the developing changes. It is active in combating them and when a new consciousness has arisen, in opposing it. In India many people are perplexed to find that after three decades of independence, followed by certain inevitable economic consequences, communalism, casteism, lack of a sense of national unity are growing instead of going down. It seems that the progressive forces in the country have to fight anew the same battle that they carried on during the long years of freedom struggle. Many people argue that class struggle and Marxism do not seem to affect the Indian situation and the hold of religion and communal feeling continues to be as strong as before. The same arguments that were advanced in earlier years—that the spiritual heritage and traditions of India would not be vulnerable to Western materialist outlook—are advanced again. Using for the first time the term 'historical materialism', Engels said in his special introduction to the 1892 English Edition of Socialism Utopian and Scientific: "And thus I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the term 'historical materialism' to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another."1 Reiterating that ultimately the economic basis is the decisive force, but this does not mean that other influences do not work, Engels, in his letter dated August 5, 1890, to C Scbroidt says: "And if this man has not yet discovered that while the material mode of existence is the primus agens (primary agent) this does not preclude the ideological spheres from reacting upon it in their turn, though with a secondary effect, he cannot possibly have understood the subject he is writing about."2 Engels further clarifies this point in his letter to J Bloch (September 21, 1890): "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economical element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure— 1 Marx-Engels, Selected Works (One volume), Moscow, 1970, pp 382-383. 2 Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence (One volume), Moscow, Progress Publishers. 1975, p 393.