At this point, it is instructive to consider three additional points made in a passage from The German Ideology which elaborate on the ‘first premise of all human history’:
(1) …[We] must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that humans must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history”. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the creation of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is a historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life…
(2) The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need, the action of satisfying and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired, leads to new needs; and this creation of new needs is the first historical act…
(3) The third relation which, from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that humans, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other humans, to reproduce [fortzupflanzen] their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family…
These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three sides or, to make it clear to the Germans, three “moments”, which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first humans, and which still assert themselves in history today. 46
The long passage quoted here introduces a transhistorical concept of life grounded in basic physiological needs: food, drink, habitation, clothing and so on. Obviously, the need to sustain human life at its most elemental level never disappears, no matter how sophisticated economic activity becomes. The new needs that are created via the satisfaction of these first needs never leave the domain of the basic sustenance of the human, even as they are not readily identifiable as basic components of human life. In other words, new needs always bear some relation to human survival: the social production of the means of life can never be disassociated from the social production of the means of subsistence, even as the expression of human life exceeds, as Marx and Engels convey it in the earlier passage, ‘the reproduction of the physical existence of…individuals’. In short, The German Ideology operates with a radically expanded concept of subsistence registered by the concept of life. But a difficulty arises in these passages: the social production of the means of life includes two ‘first historical acts’. How do we address this apparent tension?
<sup>46</sup> Marx and Engels, DI, 28-9 (GI, 48-50).
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