Selectively, yes. If after an honest appraisal of evidence you find elites railroading norms against the agency of common folk, then Marxist thought entails a solid set of working assumptions. However, take that with a grain of salt. Marxist historians are prone to polemic.

Early in graduate school I had to read some work by Christopher Hill, a noted Marxist active from the 40s-90s. His career saw Marxist scholarship rise and fall out of fashion (largely from its class/economic determinism as new schools flowered after the 1970s). You can find a critical review I wrote of his The World Turned Upside Down here: https://www.academia.edu/7094738/Not_Quite_Right-Side-Up_Review_of_The_World_Turned_Upside_Down_by_Christopher_Hill. His book was characteristic of problems in Historical Materialism.

In my own field, drug history, Marxist thought is rampant but fortunately diminishing. Before foundational figures like David Musto and David Courtwright added some much-needed nuance to the field in the 1970s, the prevailing consensus held that a stigmatized population of criminals resulted only from prohibitive legislation in the early twentieth century. In reality, the typical opiate addict changed from a middle- or upper-class white woman in the late nineteenth century to an urban, under-class white male in the early twentieth not as a result legal statutes, but rather the deaths of ailing patients and tightening medical supply from a developing addiction paradigm. By the time Congress passed the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Act, the medical addict population was already falling, though recreational use remained steady and became more prominent and increasingly unacceptable in the public eye. Not to mention that then, as now, nonmedical opiate and cocaine addicts were likely to engage in other crimes to support their habit.

Sorry for the tangent! But hopefully you can see that Historical Materialism is applicable to many fields but rarely stands alone. Belonging to any one "school" leaves you vulnerable to over-determinism, something that does not make for good history.

As a follow up, isn't it the case that the terms ''bronze age'' ''iron age'' and so forth stem from the Marxist tradition?