Marxism and historical typology of culture

The paper focuses on the question of how we can use the classical Marxist thesis of productive forces as a basis for explaining historical cultural dynamics and building historical typology of culture. The key finding and conclusion of the paper is that this postulation of marxism works pretty well for explaining the dynamics of the archaic and traditional types of culture since it was in those periods of social evolution that technological advancement played the role of an innovative driver bringing about the succession of historical types of culture. This theory, however, fails to explain the content of these historical types. As for the creative type of cultural dynamics, it fails to explain both the content of historical types and their succession. This fact can be accounted for the reductionism of Marxism, that did not allow its proponents to take into account other factors (in addition to material culture) decisive for historical dynamics of the creative culture such as religion, political ideology, and science.