It's very debatable, but I also think it's not that relevant. The world doesn't exist in a static, idealized form for all eternity. Things change over time through their interactions with other things. That's at the core of dialectical materialism. It can be useful to analyze the past and how particular forms of social and economic arrangements influenced the development of human societies, but I don't think it really says much about what we should be doing now. We don't have the counterexample of a world that developed differently. All we can say is what happened. The world developed that way, for all the good and bad that came with it. But we don't live in a world where most people are illiterate hunter gatherers or peasant farmers anymore. We need to analyze the reality we exist in as it is now without presuming that this represents some natural state.