The ideas of V Gordon Childe In defence of historical materialism

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that V. Gordon Childe's archaeological work provides decisive empirical confirmation of the Marxist materialist conception of history, specifically the claim that changes in the productive forces drive epochal social transformations. Childe's discovery of the Neolithic revolution — the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to settled agriculture — and his theory of the urban revolution demonstrate that prehistory, like written history, is marked by revolutionary ruptures rather than gradual evolution. The central thesis is that only a Marxist framework, grounded in the primacy of labour and the development of tools, can explain the laws governing social change across the entirety of human history, and that this vindication of historical materialism has direct political implications for the necessity of socialist revolution today.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on the foundational Marxist distinction between biological and social evolution, locating human specificity in the labour process and tool-making. It deploys Engels' formulation from Marx's graveside — that humans must first eat, drink, and shelter themselves before pursuing politics, science, or art — as the organising principle for understanding prehistory. The article also engages directly with Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, particularly its argument that the state emerges alongside irreconcilable class antagonisms and cannot be abolished without abolishing classes.

The concept of progress is treated dialectically: progress is real but contradictory, discontinuous, and measured by the development of the productive forces, not by moral improvement. The article situates itself within the tradition of historical materialism as a scientific method, not a dogma, and positions Childe as a figure who applied this method to evidence unavailable to Marx and Engels, thereby strengthening the theory's empirical basis. The rejection of idealist approaches to history — whether religious, cultural, or "great man" theories — is presented as a necessary corollary of the materialist standpoint.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article connects Childe's work to the contemporary crisis of capitalism in several ways. First, it argues that the same bourgeois prejudice against a scientific view of history that Childe confronted in the 1930s and 1940s persists today, manifesting in attacks on the concept of revolution itself — for example, the preference for the term "Neolithic transition" over "Neolithic revolution" among mainstream archaeologists. This is presented as an ideological reflection of capitalism's inability to conceive of qualitative social transformation.

Second, the article cites the case of Klaus Schmidt's excavations at Göbekli Tepe, where Schmidt argued that religious motives preceded economic changes, only for later evidence of permanent settlement and grain processing to undermine his idealist interpretation. This is framed as evidence of the "terrible crisis of science under capitalism" — the willingness of academics to ignore empirical evidence to avoid Marxist conclusions.

Third, the article draws a direct line from Childe's defence of progress to the present conjuncture: capitalism has become a "complete fetter" on the productive forces, and genuine progress is only possible through socialist revolution. The reference to Childe's praise of Soviet mechanisation as "liberation from toil" positions the argument within the broader revolutionary Marxist tradition's rejection of reformism and its insistence on the necessity of working-class power.

Where the Argument Continues

The article leaves several questions open for further development. It does not explore in detail the specific mechanisms by which the Neolithic revolution unfolded — the relationship between climate change, population pressure, and technological innovation — nor does it engage with more recent archaeological debates about the pace and geography of agricultural adoption. The argument about the urban revolution and the emergence of the state is sketched rather than fully developed, and the article does not address the transition from the urban revolution to later modes of production (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) in any systematic way.

These gaps are addressed elsewhere in the IDOM corpus. The broader Marxist theory of history is developed in articles on Engels' Origin of the Family and on the materialist conception of history more generally. The question of the state and its relationship to class society is treated in depth in articles on Lenin's State and Revolution and on the bourgeois state. The critique of David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything — mentioned only in passing here — is likely developed in other IDOM pieces that engage with anarchist and post-left critiques of Marxism. Against the Stream episodes on historical materialism and on the Neolithic revolution would provide further elaboration.

Connections

This article should be read alongside:

• Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State — the theoretical foundation for Childe's archaeological work
• Marx and Engels, The German Ideology — the original formulation of historical materialism
• Childe, Man Makes Himself and What Happened in History — the primary texts summarised here
• IDOM articles on the materialist conception of history and on the state
• The broader Marxist tradition on the relationship between base and superstructure, particularly the question of how changes in the productive forces translate into changes in social relations

The article also implicitly connects to debates within archaeology and anthropology about the origins of inequality, the nature of "primitive communism," and the role of ideology in social change — debates that continue in both academic and activist circles.

Key Quotes

1. "In the course of the long time over which archaeologists can follow the story of tools, men have changed not only their tools but also the whole way in which they got their living (their economy), and consequently the way in which society was organised for cooperation."

2. "Priests, officials, merchants, artisans, and soldiers should represent new classes that, as classes, could find no livelihood in a self-sufficing [subsistence-only] food-producing community, still less in a band of hunters."

3. "Progress is real, if discontinuous. The upward curve resolves itself into a series of troughs and crests. But in those domains that archaeology as well as written history can survey, no trough ever declines to the low level of the preceding one, each crest out-tops its last precursor."

4. "It is hoped that a consideration of revolutions, so remote that it is impossible to get angry or enthusiastic about them, may help to vindicate the idea of progress against sentimentalists and mystics."

5. "Under the soviets, mechanisation means liberation from toil — not to work for a capitalist's profits but for the community, in a co-operative effort to raise the standard of life for all."