ABSTRACT
Marxism can help us to see the grain of truth in the old legend that good and evil both resulted from the fall of man from his primitive state; so we can balance optimism and pessimism. Marxism, and only Marxism, can also help contemporary historians to preserve a sense of proportion between social forces and the men through whom they work, between statistics and poetry, necessity and freedom. For a Marxist historian, given sufficient accumulation of factual material, should be able to differentiate at any stage of a society's development between those elements making for change and those retarding it; and between progressive societies in which the political and ideological superstructure is in harmony with the economic structure of society. It allows its further development, and reactionary societies in which an outmoded ruling class strives to stifle economic advance, to maintain its privileged position by political force and ideological fraud.
