Marx and Engels never offer a temporal reading of the first historical act, but it is useful to make two broad observations. First, a dialectical interplay between the present and the past is signalled by the premise that the new resides within the means of satisfying existing needs. The domain of the past, or existing needs, all the way down to the basic need to eat, drink and sleep, cannot be thought apart from the means to satisfy such needs. Nor is the domain of the present, the production of these means, intelligible in isolation from the content of what they satisfy. There is no chronological succession here: one moment (the existence of a need) is not subsequently followed by another (the creation of the means to satisfy this need). Rather, the domain of the present is the dialectic between the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. That is, the present is a dialectic unto itself, and it actively creates the past as an existing need. The relationship between the present and the past is thus a dialectical relationship between a dialectical present and a non-dialectical past. This is an interplay between the present and the past which clearly prioritises the present over the past, because the production of the means of life is the production of both new and existing needs. Existing needs and the production of the means to satisfy them may codetermine one another, but this relationship would be essentially static – it would have no temporality – were it not for these means. In Marx, the priority of the historical present – the priority of the actual – is indebted to the concept of means. This leads to the second observation. The future of the first historical act gives direction to the dialectic of the present and the past. The future by no means predetermines this dialectic, but it does guide the present’s ongoing creation and negation of the existence of the past, which is to say the ongoing expansion and satisfaction of social needs within the present. Yet – quite crucially – the future does not lie in waiting. The domain of the future is not the waiting overcoming of the present in the same way that the present actually overcomes the past. It is not the speculative formal repetition of an actual dialectic played out between the present and the past. To take this stance would be to relegate the future, and with it the temporality of the first historical act more generally, to a historicist framework wherein the future becomes ‘a moment which has yet to arrive’. Rather, the future is wholly immanent to the present’s transcendence of the past. Better yet: the present’s dialectical transcendence of the past is the past’s future (the present is the future of the past). Taken together, these two observations give shape to the twofold temporality of the first historical act.<sup>61</sup>
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