Problems of Marxist Historiography 5 ago the archaeologist Gordon Childe in th^ very title of his work, Man Makes Himself, showed that production technology is after all inseparable from ideas. Matter does not create technology; human ideas, reflected in skill, dexterity, and science, create it. When Maurice Dobb argues in his Studies in the Development of Capitalism that the inventions which triggered the English Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century came not earlier, and only then, because the surrounding economic circumstances were not favourable earlier, is he not suggesting a reverse determination of 'forces of production*—the supposedly material base—by social relationships? Marx's view of historical development is clearly far more refined and persuasive than a mere extension of materialist determination to social evolution: 'Just as we cannot judge an individual by the opinion he has of himself, so we cannot judge a period of social transformation by its own consciousness.1 This statement means that the intricacies of the contemporary modes of production and social relationships could not be seen in the earlier periods. Rather, they were always misconceived. To Marx such misconceptions or imperfect perceptions set limits to the growth of further ideas, or of action during the process of transformation. When he said that 'ideas become a material force once they have gripped the masses', he surely meant that consciousness once generalised delimits the range of ideas of individuals and social action. Religion, and race or community prejudices could colour class struggles and shape their results (we can illustrate this from our own history). What happened in the epoch of capitalism and as a consequence of the simultaneous or attendant scientific revolution was the creation of a possibility, re-realised in Marxism, of an approximately closer perception of the mode of production and social relationships with a view to a far more resolute guidance of the 'transformation' or social revolution. It is in this sense that the achievement of the perception by the working class of the real world around it and the potentiality of its own revolutionary role—its 'class consciousness'—has been given such signal importance in Marxist practice. But this surely means that the role of ideas compared with earlier periods has been substantially enlarged: blind struggles have been replaced by sighted ones. Can we not go further and say that this has been a feature of human development, and that the bourgeoisie, which according to the Communist Manifesto had played such a 'revolutionary role', was responsible for the previous enlargement? I feel convinced that Marx believed that ideas would be attaining continuously greater importance in future. When he spoke of the future as one where mankind marched 'from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom', I feel convinced (in spite of Engels's unfortunate gloss on 'freedom* as the 'recognition of necessity*) that Marx looked forward to ideas at last-gaining ascendancy over matter, not by any spiritualist exercise, but by the abundance of material wealth which communism would ultimately produce.