In fact, in this reading of Hegel — one affirmed by Marx himself in his own doctrine — the future is already present within the present of time: the present is already immanently the future it "ought" to have. Historical change exists, but it is systemic change; it is the movement between the great Hegelian "shapes" or Gestalten, which foreshadow later structural conceptions of the social totality, of epistemes or even modes of production.

This is not to say that such a notion of totality does not remain ambiguous: for the affirmation of the future already latent in the present can mean on the one hand that the future is already here, but waiting within the present as the statue waits to be disengaged from the sculptors block of marble; or it can simply mean that whatever future is already present in the unsubstantial subjective form of wishes and longings, never to be realized insofar as "the future never comes."

Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations (Verso, 2010) p. 72