Breaking down the question
The question is in two movements, and both must be served. The first — highlight the main features of historical materialism as propounded by Marx — asks for an accurate exposition of the theory in Marx's own terms. The verb highlight signals that the examiner wants the defining features drawn out clearly, not an exhaustive treatise: the materialist premise, the mode of production, base and superstructure, class struggle, and dialectical change.
The second movement — how far is this theory relevant in understanding contemporary societies? — is an evaluative task. The phrase how far invites a graded answer: relevant in some respects, strained in others. A candidate who answers only "yes" or "no" has missed the calibration the question demands.
As propounded by Marx is a constraint worth noticing. The examiner wants Marx's formulation — anchored in The German Ideology and the 1859 Preface — before any assessment. Fidelity to the source in part one earns the licence to evaluate in part two.
How to approach it
Begin with the materialist starting point and build outward to the full architecture: Marx's historical materialism and its theory of class supplies the forces and relations of production, the base-superstructure model, and the sequence of epochs driven by class struggle. State these as a connected system, not a list of terms.
For part two, do not simply declare the theory relevant or dead. Test it against contemporary realities — deepening global inequality, precarious and gig labour, the concentration of capital — where it retains force, and against realities it handles less well — the persistence of identity-based movements, the expanded middle class, the absence of proletarian revolution in advanced economies.
Bring in Karl Marx and later Marxists such as Gramsci to show the theory's capacity for internal renewal. Conclude with a measured verdict on its enduring analytical value.
Model answer
Historical materialism is Marx's theory of history and society, set out with Engels in The German Ideology and compressed in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Its starting premise is materialist: human beings must first produce their means of subsistence before they can make history, so the way a society organises production shapes everything else about it. "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being," Marx wrote, "but their social being that determines their consciousness."
The mode of production. The central concept is the mode of production, the combination of the forces of production (tools, technology, labour, raw materials) and the relations of production (the property and class relationships through which production is organised). Each historical epoch — primitive communism, ancient slavery, feudalism, capitalism — is defined by its characteristic mode.
Base and superstructure. Upon the economic base rises a superstructure of law, politics, religion, and ideas. The base conditions the superstructure, so that the dominant ideas of any age are, in the main, the ideas of its ruling class. Ideology thus tends to legitimate existing economic arrangements.
Class struggle. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Because the relations of production divide society into a class that owns the means of production and a class that must labour for it, antagonism of interest is structural. Under capitalism the bourgeoisie and proletariat confront one another over the extraction of surplus value.
Dialectical change. Change is driven by contradiction. As the forces of production develop, they come into conflict with the existing relations of production, which turn from forms of development into fetters. This contradiction is resolved through revolutionary transformation, ushering in a new mode of production. Capitalism, Marx held, generated its own gravedigger in an ever-expanding, ever-more-organised proletariat, and would give way to socialism and ultimately a classless communism.
Relevance to contemporary societies. How far does this framework illuminate the present?
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Where it retains force. The concentration and centralisation of capital that Marx foresaw is vividly borne out by today's global corporations and the extreme concentration of wealth. The commodification of ever more of social life, the volatility of capitalist crisis, and the spread of precarious, "gig", and informal labour all resonate with Marx's account of exploitation and the reserve army of labour. As a theory of inequality and of the power that flows from economic position, historical materialism remains indispensable.
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Where it is strained. Yet key predictions have not held. Revolution did not come in the advanced capitalist economies; instead a large, differentiated middle class emerged, and welfare states softened class antagonism. The working class fragmented rather than unified. Contemporary conflict often runs along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and ecology that a purely economic model captures imperfectly — the very new social movements that class reductionism struggles to explain.
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The theory's capacity for renewal. Marxism has met these difficulties by developing. Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony explained why the working class consents to its own domination through cultural leadership, enriching the base-superstructure model with real autonomy for ideas. Later Marxists analysed the state, consumer culture, and global capitalism in ways that keep the tradition alive. This adaptability is itself evidence of the framework's fertility.
Assessment. Historical materialism is best judged neither as a vindicated prophecy nor as a discredited relic, but as a powerful and still-productive method for analysing the economic foundations of social life, the reality of exploitation, and the link between material interest and power. Its economic determinism, taken rigidly, is too narrow to explain the plurality of contemporary conflicts and identities. Taken flexibly, as Marx himself and his ablest successors used it, it remains one of sociology's most penetrating tools for understanding a world of deepening inequality and concentrated capital. Its relevance, in short, is considerable but conditional — strongest as an analysis of capitalism's structure, weakest as a law of inevitable revolutionary outcome.
Examiner's perspective
Scripts on this question fail most often by imbalance: either a long exposition of Marx with a token paragraph on relevance, or a sweeping judgement on relevance resting on a shaky account of the theory. The mark scheme rewards both an accurate statement of historical materialism and a genuinely graded assessment.
Examiners value candidates who resist the two easy verdicts — that Marx has been "proved right" by inequality, or "proved wrong" by the absence of revolution — and who instead distinguish the aspects that illuminate the present from those that do not. Citing developments in labour, capital concentration, and new social movements as concrete test cases lifts an answer above the generic.
The strongest scripts show that the theory has evolved — invoking Gramsci's hegemony to demonstrate Marxism's internal resources — and close with a precise verdict: relevant as a method for analysing capitalism and inequality, limited as a deterministic prediction of revolutionary change.