As an archaeologist, Marxist materialsm is hugely important, not by choice, but by necessity. I´ve written about it a bit before here. Take this statement from Marx:

The phantoms formed in the human brain [cultures, nations, religions...] are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.

Here, Marx is critiquing historical idealists, who traced a history of nations, religions, ethnicities, and other conceptual construcuts. He tells them they need to reduce their focus to the material, productive things that are actually happening. Archaeologists, by the very nautre of our science, must go the other way. All we have is the material, the productive, and from that we must reconstruct these ¨phantoms.¨

Marxism, as many people here have already mentioned, is still present in the social sciences, if only covertly.

There are at least a couple of major centers of Marxist historiography, even if these are waining.

For example, English Marxism, whose greats include Perry Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, among many others. These aren't just a couple of guys writing articles no one reads. Hobsbawm's work on Modern History is still essential reading for those interested in the 19th century. Although several of these figures have passed away, including Hobsbawm himself, their influence is still very strong even if not all their intellectual disciples would call themselves Marxist.

Latin America also has a great many Marxist historians. In both Chile and Mexico numerous historians still use explicitly Marxist theories, and Cuba is both a producer of Marxist histories as well as an exporter of teachers who teach young Central American students how to approach history from a Marxist perspective (I personally know of Marxist professors who do this in Guatemala and Nicaragua).

I would imagine that in explicitly Communist countries like China that there would be either Marxist or Marxist influenced historiography, but I won't speculate further on what I don't know.

The USSR had a huge influence in the technical and intellectual formation of many people in the third world. Even those who abandoned Communism as an ideology, like Cuban historian Rafael Rojas who is now anti-Communist, show the strong undercurrent of Marxist methodology.

Part of the problem with Marxism, as many here have expressed, is that rather than seeing it as a series of tools that Marx created with the intention of them evolving organically, Marxist historiography would frequently be rigid or even absurd. Many authors from the USSR whom I have read, on subjects from Ancient and Medieval history to Latin America, would frequently use concepts like bourgeoisie and proletariat without paying much heed to major differences in the ways these classes would manifest in countries outside of Western Europe. Marxist intellectuals from those areas would often try to give their own spins to Marxist theory, such as Mariategui's 'Marxist Essays on Peruvian History', but these were often considered heresy by an overly orthodox Marxist academia.

Edit: I noticed that I didn't really follow through on my 'absurd' point here. One good example is that many historians would cite Lenin, Marx, Engels, or even Stalin to support their points, when such a citation wasn't necessary. They would do it often to prove that their proposals fell in line with Marxist orthodoxy.

Marx's theories were often quoted so as to give legitimacy to theories that could have no merit. A good example is the Asiatic Form of Production. Marx conceived of this as a catch all concept for modes of production outside of Europe. It is still taught in Cuba and was used regularly in the USSR until the latter turned capitalist. Perry Anderson, an English Marxist free from Soviet obsessions with orthodoxy, wrote a brilliant essay included in his book Lineages of the Absolutist State, where he tears down the concept of an Asiatic Mode of Production and systematically shows that Marx, in this case, had no idea what he was talking about. But this didn't touch the more rigid sources of Marxist academia, who still teach it to this day (as I personally experienced).

The rigidity with which much of Marxist historiography progressed was only part of the problem. Another issue is that Marxist historiographical theory was closely tied to the real world political project of socialism. When the USSR and Eastern Bloc fell it seemed to invalidate a Marxist theory which claimed (or whose proponents claimed) was able to scientifically predict the progress of socio-economic life, with socialism as a superior and thus inevitable form of society. This, in my view, was far more important to the fall of Marxist theory than any of its other inherent flaws. The Left in general, not just historians, became disillusioned with Marxist theory and began branching out. Some threw the baby out with the bathwater and became neo-Liberal positivists. Others learned about all the awesome historiographical theories that had piggy-backed on Marx's dialectical materialist approached to history and then evolved further on their own, letting both new and old ideas intertwine and improve their methodologies.

For all the problems with Marxist theory, it was a great contribution to history back in the day and is still very much a part of contemporary social sciences, as others have commented, even if the debt isn't always acknowledged. In the 19th century there was a great push to turn history and the humanities in general into true 'social sciences', emphasis on the science. The Positivist movement, inspired by Comte, tried to establish strict methodologies and erase subjectivity from historical accounts, but still essentially targeted political and military topics, though it slowly branched out. Marx tried to create theories that could understand both the social and the economic influences behind society. Wars were important, but could be understood largely as expressions of class interest rather than the personal likes and dislikes of monarchs or, as idealist historiography would have it, the 'spirit' of a people at any given time. Dialectical materialism, emphasis on class interest and conflict, etc., these are tools that spread to archeology (as /u/CommodoreCoCo explained in a very interesting contribution), sociology (just read Max Weber to see how he spun Marx's theories into his own theories), history, and other topics. We started looking more and more at the histories of the dispossessed and exploited, and gave these very people theoretical frameworks to better understand their historical contexts.

Hell, a lot of the gender studies and race studies majors that you see on the news are deeply influenced by Marxism, though some don't seem to concerned with double checking the validity of the theories that they've created as a part of their respective fields.

Sorry if this was a bit long. I hope this answered your question.

The theoretical framework of marxism is still very popular in most fields within the humanities and social sciences and it is definitively a framework with predictive power.

To characterize the essential mover of History as a struggle between classes is, in my view, the most comprehensive explanation of historical change out there. That doesn't mean that it is capable of encompassing everything ofcourse.

Today many Historians are oriented towards a post structuralist/post modernist interpretation. They stress the failure of the 'grand narratives' (class struggle being one such narrative) in the 20th century and look toward non-materialist explanations. It is also with this reaction that we see a focus on gender studies.

I think these developments have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water. Personally, i think Historians need the courage to return, at least partially, to the grand explanations in the style of Marx and Hegel.

I don't have the knowledge to give a much better answer than that. I'll urge you not to take any answer you get to this question as gospel though. Historians here are bound to be influenced by their own theoretical allegiances.

Imagine the difference in response you'd get from posing this very question to Eric Hobsbawm on one hand and Niall Ferguson on the other.

I guess also a related question: Is it possible at all to sketch out a consistent narrative in history? Something like the "development of productive forces," or the "freedom" resulting from productivity, or the "absolute elaboration of humanity’s creative dispositions"? Which is not to say that it would be the only narrative, but a possible one that we can trace into the future. Is any sort of narrative of progress Whiggish by default, or can we add nuance to improve upon it?

Also, if no narrative can be imposed onto history, is it possible to build a politics from history at all?

To some, the totalitarian experience is basically a trauma because of the deep discredit that marxism as an in-world ideology recieved after the fall of the soviet union. Today, being Marxist in the academia is often, depending on the field, an extreme, outdated or provocative stance.

I first distinguish Marxian and Marxist, as these terms are often confused or not well known. However, please keep in mind that the Marxian label is loose and more often not self-descripted than Marxist, and exists almost solely in the academia. Marxian are eclectic in terms of interests and goals.

A Marxian conception would stick to a theoretical analysis of a few or all of Marx's principles, understanding them a social theory, and not as a prescriptive ideology. In a way, it's a manner of returning to Marx the author/theorist and letting behind the Marx constructed by the Communist/Leninist/Stalinist ideological narrative. For many Marxians, this theoretical work uncovers many options as it enables the use of many unorthodox authors, or a new approach of classical concepts. For example, many will try to stick out of the marxist economics and focus on hegelian ideas of the early Marx.

The nature of a theory, or any grand meta narrative is reductive in it's nature because of the need to reduce complexity. Complexity is the natural contingency of the world, it's sprawling natural chaos of events, occurrences, causal links or flukes. The notion of the end of grand narratives also poses great problems to macro theories and ecompassing theories. However, the inflexibility of orthodox marxist materlaism in itself was a huge problem, especially in terms of economics and class analysis.

One example of a contemporary Marxian thinker with a explicative and predictive capacity might be the now-deceased Michel Freitag, a swiss-born Québec-dwelling social theorist. As a Marxian, he developped a theory of the symbolic, which consists on a critic of post-modernity as a technocapitalist dynamic. The materialist approach is combined with the idealists intuitions of Marx and a cohesive critique of macro social orientations (rather than a economiscist critique based only on the economic nature of society).

TL:DR Marxians are trendy in many fields, Marxists are out. Marx's theory is still relevant.