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* Hellenic Open University
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLI | Number 1 | 2020 | 115–137 | doi: 10.3986/fv.41.1.04
Panagiotis Sotiris*
From Traces of Communism to Islets of 
Communism: Revisiting Althusser’s Metaphors
Introduction
In 1976 Louis Althusser delivered a lecture at the Catalan College of Building En -
gineers and Technical Architects. In the Spanish translation of the text that ap-
peared in a collection of Althusser’s texts in 1978 there is a reference to “esbozos 
y sintomas de comunismo” (outlines and symptoms of communism),
1
 a phrase 
that also appears in the English translation of the text.
2
 When Althusser incorpo-
rated parts of this text in Les vaches noires (one of his unpublished manuscripts 
from the 1970s) he referred to “esquisses et promesses du communisme” (out -
lines and promises of communism).
3
 In the IMEC archives there is also another 
French version of the text that refers to “esquisses et traces du communisme” 
(outlines and traces of communism).
4
 It is also in Les vaches noires that we find 
another metaphor that would reappear in Althusser’s texts. Althusser insists 
that “islets of communism already exist in the world” (“qu’il existe déjà dans le 
monde des îlots de communisme”).
5
 In an interview Althusser gave to Rossana 
Rossanda he speaks of “virtual forms of communism”
6
 emerging in those forms 
of associations that escape commodity relations. 
All of these metaphors point to a preoccupation with how communist forms 
might emerge within capitalist societies. However, there are from the beginning 
1
 Louis Althusser, Nuevos escritos (La crisis des movimiento comunist internacional frente a 
la teoría marxista), Editorial Laia, Barcelona 1978, p. 54.
2
 Louis Althusser, “Some Questions Concerning the Crisis of Marxist Theory and of the Inter-
national Communist Movement”, trans. David Broder, Historical Materialism 23 (1/2015), 
p. 178.
3
 Louis Althusser, Les Vaches noires. Interview imaginaire, ed. G.M. Goshgarian, PUF, Paris 
2016, p. 248.
4
 Louis Althusser, “Conférence sur la dictature de prolétariat à Barcelone. Un texte inédit de 
Louis Althusser”, Période (2014).
5
 Althusser, Les Vaches noires. Interview imaginaire, p. 264.
6
 Louis Althusser, Solitude de Machiavel, ed. Ives Sintomer, PUF, Paris 1998 , p. 285.

116
panagiotis sotiris
open questions with regard to this particular line of thinking in Althusser. Does 
this reference simply point to a quasi-metaphysical conception of the commu-
nist mode of production emerging out of the capitalist one, reproducing a version 
of the classical historicist idea of the ‘necessary’ succession of modes of produc-
tion, or the idea that every mode of production carries the seeds of its aufhebung? 
In what sense do communist elements exist as traces or outlines? How are these 
related to a theory of transition and revolution? What is the actual meaning of the 
reference to “islets of communism”? In what follows I will try to show how these 
metaphors point to both Althusser’s attempt to think through a “new practice of 
politics” for communism as well as to the limits of this thinking.
Conditions for the existence and non-existence of a mode of 
production
In order to discuss these questions we must first revisit a manuscript by Al-
thusser from 1973, entitled “Book on Imperialism”.
7
 This is part of a series of 
unpublished manuscripts by Althusser from the 1970s, which already included 
the basic aspects of the materialism of the encounter or aleatory materialism 
that was to be associated initially with the texts by Althusser from the 1980s 
published posthumously.
8
 The importance of this manuscript is that it offers 
one of Althusser’s most elaborate attempts to present a theory of the modes of 
production and of transition.
Althusser’s starting point is an emphasis on the primacy of the relations of pro-
duction over the forces of production and consequently the centrality of class 
struggle. However, it is interesting that Althusser starts the discussion on the 
mode of production with the assertion that “the socialist mode of production 
does not exist” and that in contrast “[t]he capitalist mode of production exists 
and the communist mode of production exists.”
9
 Althusser insists that this was 
also Lenin’s position:
7
 Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism. Writings, 1963-1986, ed. and trans. G.N. Goshgar-
ian, Polity, London 2020.
8
 Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–86, trans. G.M. Goshgar-
ian, Verso, London 2006.
9
 Althusser, History and Imperialism, p. 63.

117
from traces of communism to islets of communism
[Lenin] defines this transition, this “socialist socioeconomic” formation, as the 
contradictory co-existence of the capitalist mode of production and the commu-
nist mode of production – thus as the co-existence of capitalist elements and 
communist elements, of elements of the communist mode of production and of 
the capitalist mode of production.
10
Until this point, we are within positions that can also be found in the French 
debates of that period. Bettelheim used this as the starting point for his research 
on the Class Struggles in the USSR,
11
 and also Balibar would use this as an impor-
tant part of his argument in On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
12
 namely the 
idea that socialism is a period of transition marked by intensified class struggle 
and the contradictory co-existence of two opposing modes of production, the 
capitalist mode and the emerging communist mode of production. 
However, it is at this point that Althusser attempts to suggest that the commu-
nist mode of production exists from the moment the capitalist mode of produc-
tion comes into existence:
Hence the question: when does communism begin to exist, understood as ele-
ments (or seeds, but seeds in the sense of seeds capable of producing elements)? 
Answer: from the moment the capitalist mode of production exists. This answer 
is, however, too generic, and is abstract. Yet it means (a thesis defended by Marx) 
that the capitalist mode of production contains the seeds of the communist mode 
of production in its own contradictions from the moment it comes into existence. 
More precisely, we can say that communism exists (begins to exist in a real sense) 
with the earliest developments of the workers’ class struggle. Look at what Marx 
says in the [1844] Manuscripts about the French workers: society is no longer a 
means to an end, but a need. Look at everything Marx says about the disintegra-
tion of capitalist forms of the family, religion and so on.
13
10
 Ibid., p. 63.
11
 Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggle in the USSR, 2 vols., trans. Brian Pearce, Monthly Re -
view Press, New York 1976–77.
12
 Étienne Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, trans. Graham Locke, New Left 
Books, London 1977.
13
 Althusser, History and Imperialism, p. 63.

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panagiotis sotiris
Althusser suggests that this is the result of the continuous effectivity of class 
antagonism inscribed in the capitalist relation of production. In this sense, an 
element of decomposition and disintegration of the capitalist mode of produc-
tion is always present from the beginning.
The capitalist mode of production, which emerges on and from the decay of 
pre-capitalist modes of production (not just feudal, but other modes of produc-
tion as well, and not just where there is no feudalism – for example, the Asiatic 
mode of production, the lineage-based mode of production, or the vestiges of the 
slave-based mode of production), itself decays from the moment it emerges, for 
a simple reason: the antagonism of the capitalist relation of production. This an-
tagonism exists from the origin on and, from the origin on, produces effects of 
decomposition because of its antagonism (class struggle), which affects the forms 
of existence of the capitalist mode of production (division of labour, organization 
of labour, the family and other ideological state apparatuses).
14
And here is how Althusser describes the communist elements emerging in the 
context of capitalism as a result of the class struggles of the working class.
The forms in which communist elements appear in capitalist society itself are 
countless. Marx himself names a whole series of them, from forms of children’s 
education combining work and schooling to the new relations reigning in prole-
tarian organizations, the proletarian family, the proletarian community of life and 
struggle, joint-stock companies, workers’ co-operatives and so on, to say nothing 
of the “socialization of production”, which poses all sorts of problems, yet should 
also be noted. All these elements (which have multiplied in the past few years, es-
pecially since 1968; see LIP , the proletarian inventions in the class struggle: “they 
have shown that the workers could do without bosses”, Séguy) will not by them-
selves lead to communism. Better: they are not all communist elements. They are 
elements for communism. Communism will adopt them, combine them, perfect 
them and develop their potentiality [virtualités], integrating them into the revolu-
tion in the relations of production which commands everything and is still absent 
from our world. Communism, however, will not come about by itself. It has to be 
14
 Ibid., pp. 63–64.

119
from traces of communism to islets of communism
built at the end of a long march, one stage of which is called socialism, which is 
not a mode of production.
15
I think this passage is very important because it offers a rather complex theory 
of these elements for communism. The fact that Althusser insists that they are 
not communist elements but rather elements for communism points exactly to-
wards the idea of communism being the outcome of a long period of transition.
In order to substantiate his position, Althusser attempts to offer elements of a 
theory of the mode of production. Of particular interest is the way he opposes 
any theory of simple commodity production / theory of the mercantile mode of 
production as a separate mode of production. We know how this theory, which 
in a certain way can draw on the authority of Engels’s preface and supplement to 
Capital Vol. III,
16
 often returns in Marxist debates. However, Althusser also points 
out how the reference to the mercantile mode of production is also a basic ref-
erence within bourgeois ideology. Althusser insists that for bourgeois ideology:
[t]he capitalist mode of production is just the mercantile mode of production in 
its developed form, its naturally developed form: the mercantile mode of produc-
tion serves to found the capitalist mode of production in bourgeois ideology, in-
asmuch as bourgeois ideology thinks the capitalist mode of production by way of 
the founding categories of the mercantile mode of production.
17
For Althusser, this conception of the mercantile mode of production 
forms the background for the tendency of bourgeois ideology to present capital-
ism as the natural mode of production.
The capitalist mode of production, which exists, is the only one that can exist, 
the only one that exists, the only one that has a right to existence. The fact that 
it has not always existed (and even that must be qualified, for when we look into 
the matter in detail, we always find this reality, which is natural, everywhere: 
independent petty producers), or that it has not always visibly existed, obscured 
as it was by horrid realities – this is merely an accident of history. It should have 
15
 Ibid., pp. 64–65.
16
 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (MECW), Lawrence and Wishart, London 
1975–2005, vol. 37.
17
 Althusser, History and Imperialism, p. 88.

120
panagiotis sotiris
existed from all eternity and, thank God, it exists today, having carried the day 
against obscurantism, and we may be sure that nature having finally vanquished 
non-nature, light having finally triumphed over darkness, nature and light, that 
is, the capitalist mode of production, can be sure of existing for all eternity. It has 
finally been recognized!
18
Althusser does not deny the existence of independent petty producers. What he 
rejects is the position that these represent “the originary form of the capitalist 
mode of production.”
19
 His proposition is that there exists a form that may be 
termed “independent petty production” but “[t]here is nothing natural about 
this form” and “[t]his form can exist in different modes of production.”
20
This elaboration gives Althusser the opportunity to return to what he defines 
as the “pseudo-mode of socialist production.”
21
 His main point is that “in the 
socialist social formation there co-exist, in contradictory fashion, elements be-
longing to the capitalist relation of production and elements preparing for the 
communist relation of production.”
22
 But what are these elements that are pre-
paring for the communist relation of production? Here is Althusser’s answer:
The latter is prepared by collective ownership of the means of production and 
by a whole series of arrangements: the plan, guarantees that control the labour 
market, a wage structure that tends to reduce wage differentials and, generally 
speaking, organizational measures that tend to prepare communal forms of the 
management of enterprises and of the nation (measures that aim to attenuate and 
then do away with the division of labour, the division between mental and manu-
al labour, the division between town and country and so on).
23
For Althusser this suggests a broader non-historicist conception of the possibili-
ty but also of the non-possibility of a mode of production that is an integral part 
of a materialism of the encounter. Consequently, such a materialist theory of the 
emergence of capitalism presupposes
18
 Althusser 2020, pp. 88-89.
19
 Ibid., p. 92.
20
 Ibid., p. 94.
21
 Althusser, History and Imperialism, p. 98.
22
 Ibid., p. 98.
23
 Ibid.

121
from traces of communism to islets of communism
that we have a certain idea of what it means to exist for a mode of production: the 
conditions of its existence – of its enduring reproduction – and of the relationship 
of this existence to non-existence. In other words, it presupposes that we have 
a clear understanding of the fact that a mode of production may not exist, may 
exist and perish as soon as it appears, or, on the contrary, may grow stronger 
and pursue its historical destiny. This presupposes a theory of the conditions of 
existence that is at the same time a theory of the conditions of the non-existence 
or disappearance of a mode of production. For we always reason on the basis of 
accomplished fact and nothing else.
24
Although Althusser links this reference to his non-historicist conception of the 
emergence of the capitalist mode of production and the importance of thinking 
“on the basis of the accomplished fact,” a point he would also make in his later 
texts on aleatory materialism, at the same time it can be considered an attempt 
by Althusser to rethink the possibility and non-possibility of a communist rela-
tion of production. This relation of existence to non-existence points exactly to 
a conception of history as an open-ended process, something that also points 
to the open character of any process of revolutionary change and transition to 
communism. Thus, the entire problematic of the ‘socialist transition’ should not 
be considered in the sense of ‘building socialism’ but in terms of a theory (and 
experimental practice) of the conditions for the existence and the conditions for 
the non-existence of communists relations and forms within ‘transition process-
es’ conditioned by class struggle. 
For Althusser, modes of production do not necessarily find corresponding social 
formations that enable their reproduction. This can explain why elements of 
modes of production emerge but fail to achieve such social reproduction. This 
is a basic tenet of Althusser’s conception of the centrality of the encounter and 
how an encounter might take place, might not take place, or might take place 
but not hold.
[N]ot every mode of production ‘finds’, automatically, by virtue of some sort of di-
vine right or ontological argument (which would have it that every essence is fully 
entitled to exist, that every mode of production exists by virtue of its essence), 
the form in which it can exist. If it ‘finds’ that form, that is, if existing conditions 
24
 Ibid., p. 103.

122
panagiotis sotiris
allow it to endow itself with existence, to realize its existence, to ‘forge’ it, then 
the mode of production in question will exist. If it fails to find that form, if existing 
conditions do not allow it to realize it, to impose it, then the mode of production 
will not exist. Or if it has begun to exist for a time but, at the end of the prescribed 
period (for in these matters Spinozist necessity is unrelenting), has not managed 
to endow itself with the form of social formation corresponding to it, that is, the 
form that allows it to reproduce itself in either simple or extended form, then the 
mode of production in question will perish.
25
For Althusser, this also goes for the communist mode of production and its his-
torical possibility. That is why it is important for Althusser “to compare the cas-
es of existence with the cases of non-existence (in the sense indicated above) 
and think the conditions of existence setting out from the conditions of non-ex-
istence.”
26
 This points, in my reading, to Althusser at the same time thinking all 
the failures and shortcomings of ‘actually existing socialism’ and, by means of 
this, rethinking how the communist elements or the elements for communism 
can actually be transformed into communist social forms that could last. More-
over, it points towards the necessity of thinking the very contradictory character 
of any transition process, the constant and uneven antagonistic confrontation 
between capitalist and communist relations and forms, but also the equally 
constant and uneven class struggles involved, as well as the fact that there is 
nothing predetermined in this process.
This is not without political consequences, with all due respect to specialists of 
the accomplished fact. For (to come back to the case before us, socialism) it can 
tell us something about the conditions of existence of an embryonic mode of pro-
duction setting out from the conditions of its non-existence. This contradictory 
situation is very interesting, for – what a surprise! – it simply repeats Lenin’s 
theory on the ‘transition’ from capitalism to communism. In socialism, the con-
ditions for the non-existence of communism have all been met and are there for 
all to see: they are the subsisting elements of the capitalist mode of production. 
Of course, they exist in “different forms” (Lenin), as do the classes and the class 
struggle; of course, they exist in “different forms” – Marx would have [said] 
‘transformed forms’. Yet they are there, and are not imaginary at all, but very 
25
 Ibid., pp. 128–129.
26
 Ibid., p. 132.

123
from traces of communism to islets of communism
real and active. And it is clearly on condition that we ‘resolve’, in the right sense 
(in the right direction, thanks to a well-oriented political line), this contradiction 
between the conditions of existence and the conditions of non-existence of the 
communist mode of production that we will some day reach the communist mode 
of production. As for those who think that everything has already been decided 
in advance (as the destiny of the capitalist mode of production was decided in 
advance as soon as it came into existence, the proof being that, when it happened 
to perish because the conditions of its existence had not been fulfilled, one says 
it never existed – it is so easy to suppose, in this way, that all the dead never 
existed!), they need only reread Lenin, who said: we can fall back rather than 
advancing towards communism; we can “cool our heels” [faire antichambre] in a 
socialism which, because it has stopped advancing, retreats. It really seems to me 
that Lenin had understood the interest of this little question about the conditions 
of the non-existence (or death) of a mode of production fairly well. I mean the 
political interest (for, thank god, Lenin, at least, was not given to speculation).
27
Consequently, for Althusser “the question of the existence of a mode of produc-
tion in a social formation is posed only as a function of this contradictory cou-
ple: conditions of its non-existence/conditions of its existence.”
28
 However, it is 
also obvious that Althusser at this point insists on the fact that the elements for 
communism can be transformed into communist social forms only after a long 
process of struggle and transformation. 
It is also interesting that later in this manuscript Althusser returns to this point. 
Althusser here deals with how Marx insists on only discussing phenomena in 
their pure essence. Althusser believes that Marx here refers to a process of sci-
entific experimentation.
Yet Marx does nothing other than what any scientist does. He ‘isolates’ the mech-
anism that he has succeeded in identifying as essential; he isolates it from all 
details that might alter its course in an accidental, not an essential way; and he 
analyses the phenomenon in its ‘pure form’. Just like the physicist who analyses 
the law of falling bodies, to take a simple example, he ignores everything that does 
not concern the phenomenon in its pure form (friction and so on). He thus creates 
27
 Ibid., pp. 132–133.
28
 Ibid., p. 133.

124
panagiotis sotiris
the conditions for true scientific experimentation; the fact that it is purely concep-
tual experimentation changes nothing here. It is indeed an experiment in which 
the scientist Marx allows the elements to vary after isolating them as pertinent.
29
Although Althusser here mainly refers to Marx’s attempt to theorize the capi-
talist mode of production, it is also possible to think that Althusser here also 
in a certain way is referring to the transition to communism as a process of ex-
perimentation, something that Marx also suggested in the Critique of the Gotha 
Program.
The question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in commu-
nist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there 
that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered 
scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thou-
sandfold combination of the word people with the word state. 
Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary 
transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political 
transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictator-
ship of the proletariat.
30
Consequently, I would like to suggest that the theoretical line that we can find in 
Althusser’s Book on Imperialism is exactly a conceptualisation of the question of 
the potential communist mode of production in terms of the contradictory and 
antagonistic co-existence of capitalist and communist relations in a transition 
period, a period that can only be described as a ‘long march’ of constant struggle 
and experimentation. This conception is also echoed in Balibar’s arguments in 
his book on the dictatorship of the proletariat. 
That is why it produces nothing but confusion to picture socialism in terms of the 
simple ‘rationalization’ of the organization of social labour, the parasitic capitalist 
class having been eliminated (even if this process is supposed to be accompanied, 
at the social level, by a fair distribution of the products of labour, and at the po-
litical level by greater liberty and increased ‘participation’ for the masses). Such 
29
 Ibid., p. 143.
30
 Marx and Engels, Collected Works (MECW), vol. 24, p. 95.

125
from traces of communism to islets of communism
a picture leaves out the essential point: that socialism, as an historical process, 
can only develop on the basis of a profound, progressive transformation of the di-
vision of labour, on the basis of a conscious political struggle against the division 
of manual and intellectual labour, against ‘narrow’ specialization, for what Marx 
called ‘all-round competence’. Socialism cannot consist in the permanent asso-
ciation, in the service of their common interest, of the various social strata and 
categories of ‘working people’ existing in capitalist society: it cannot perpetuate, 
or even ‘guarantee’ the distinctions in function and status which divide them, as 
if there always had to be engineers on the one hand and unskilled workers on the 
other, professors, lawyers and labourers . . . It can only be the continuous process 
of the transformation of these divisions, which will finally suppress the founda-
tions of all competition, in the capitalist sense of the term, between working peo-
ple, therefore the very foundations of wage labour and consequently the bases 
of commodity production, whether planned or not. In an earlier chapter I talked 
about the constitution of the proletariat as a class in terms of a process which can 
only ‘end’ with the constitution of the proletariat as the ruling class. It seems to 
me that it is therefore now time to propose the following argument: socialism is 
a process in the course of which the condition of the proletariat becomes general-
ized at the same time as it is transformed and tends to disappear. This is, in both 
senses of the term, the end point of the formation of the proletariat.
31
Communism in the margins
However, there is also another emerging tendency in Althusser’s thinking of the 
emergence of potential communist forms. This has to do with the various ref-
erences to the margins. We know that Althusser always referred to Marx’s pas-
sage in Vol. I of Capital about commodity relations emerging in the interstices 
of pre-capitalist modes of production. Here is the passage from volume one of 
Capital.
In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the 
conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men 
into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, in-
creases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer 
31
 Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, pp. 149–150.

126
panagiotis sotiris
to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world 
only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia.
32
We have seen that this can be read in the sense of a non-historicist conception 
of the emergence of social forms and potential antagonistic forms of production 
and as part of a materialism of the encounter. However, there is also Althusser’s 
interest in the image of the margin.
This is evident in his 1976 manuscript How to be a Marxist in Philosophy.
33
 An 
important segment of this manuscript is dedicated to a discussion of the image 
of the margin. This segment is Althusser’s attempt to rethink how different phil-
osophical systems include a notion of Order, but also a notion of the limits of 
this Order, i.e. the particular relation between the inside and the outside: 
We must accordingly find the means, and it is not easy, to think, simultaneously, 
the Order which is round, and thus limited by its curve, and the not-outside, that 
is, the absence of curves and limits. A limit that is, in sum, a non-limit, a circle 
that is a circle, but with no outside.
34
 
With regard to this notion of the limit, Althusser first turns towards Heidegger, 
whose thinking on the question of the limit he finds interesting, while at the 
same time he thinks Heidegger “acknowledges the issue, but thrashes around in 
rather than resolving it, since, instead of maintaining a healthy balance, he as-
signs Being primacy over beings, like the good spiritualist that he has basically 
continued to be.”
35
 Instead, Althusser turns towards Derrida.
Derrida has very convincingly shown that we must look to the margin for the an-
swer to the question of a limit that is not a limit. Everybody knows what a margin 
is: there is one on this very page, an empty space alongside a full one. You would 
think that fullness could not do without emptiness, and the other way around. 
This presupposes a limit between the two, of course, but a limit that is not an 
Order or, at any rate, does not derive from an Order, since we can vary the margin, 
32
 Marx and Engels, Collected Works (MECW), vol. 35, p. 90.
33
 Louis Althusser, How to be a Marxist in Philosophy, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Bloomsbury, 
London 2017.
34
 Ibid., p. 86.
35
 Ibid., p. 87.

127
from traces of communism to islets of communism
and thus the limit. It makes no difference whether the margin is two centime-
tres wide, or three; it’s enough to come to an agreement with the compositor, 
and you’re all set. Derrida has seen, then, that this ‘play’ matters to the margin, 
quite as much as the margin matters to the limit. But this ‘play’ of course changes 
everything, since it is free, not constrained; thus it frees itself and frees us of all 
Order, flat or round, monist or dualist, or even twisted.
36
However, Althusser does not limit himself to this appreciation of Derrida and his 
conception of the margin.
37
 For Althusser, the margin becomes here the central 
part of an almost poetic thinking of the emergence of new social forms and com-
munist virtualities within capitalist formations.
This margin is now beginning to sustain our hopes, after being subjected to our 
despair. For what is in the margin is marginal: the mad, children, deviants, phi-
losophers, the mentally ill, deranged or normal artists, the abnormal and so on. 
And it turns out that, once normality has been demystified (Canguilhem has done 
a great deal to help us understand this, after Spinoza and Nietzsche), one sud-
denly realizes that interesting things go on in the vicinity of the margin: on the 
margin of official society, where the exploited workers and the immigrant workers 
are, together with children, from whose mouths the truth has long come, and 
artists, from the greatest to the humblest, with Breton and his friends in-between, 
and the poor in spirit when they are saints, even if they don’t know it, and the 
mad, and certain prisoners, Soviet and Latin American prisoners in particular 
and so on. The margin is also the beach, the one on which everyone will alight 
to enjoy the sun after we have at last crossed this terrible river of socialism in the 
boat of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And then we shall have the free reign 
of the margin on the beach of communism: there will be no more written texts, 
no more written right, no more written law, no more written orders, no more writ-
ing, nothing but living traces, traces of the spoken word, exchanges of words and 
goods without money, without (written) accounts, exchanges of looks and voices, 
of love or hate, with no dishonest descriptions of the merchandise. This will be 
36
 Ibid., pp. 87–88.
37
 For Derrida’s conception of the margin see Jacques Derrida, Margins of philosophy, trans. 
Alan Bass, Harvester Press, London 1982.

128
panagiotis sotiris
the end of the dictatorship of writing, the end of the dictatorship of language, the 
reign of the universal margin and the universal family.
38
Moreover, Althusser insists that this emergence of new social forms at the mar-
gins is something that is already happening, and that it is not just some type of 
utopian thinking.
What is encouraging – for I know you, you’re going to say I’m raving – is that the 
margin is no utopia; it exists today, well and truly, in reality. Witness not just Der-
rida’s theory, but the existence of all the marginal sorts, in the official statistics or 
not. It exists and is developing in every country – yes, in every country, even the 
USSR. I shall explain that to you some day; unfortunately, I don’t have the time to-
day. If that isn’t a way of saying that Derrida hasn’t missed the mark in putting the 
question of the margin in the command post! The interest of Derrida’s research 
resides in the demonstration that philosophy and politics are, in a certain regard, 
the same thing. The fact that a theory of the margin such as his leads straight to 
an encounter with the theory of politics and, from a certain angle, anticipates 
communism, proves this, quite obviously, with no need for comment.
39
After some references to how science can offer ways to think of new forms, Al-
thusser does not elaborate more on the subject, calling on us to be “sure that the 
work of the sciences, the reflections of the philosophers, and the imagination of 
artists and politicians will know how to pursue it and make it more precise.”
40
Leaving aside the poetic overtones of some of the formulations, it is obvious that 
Althusser, with this imagery of the margin, attempted to think through this idea 
of elements of communism emerging in struggles and movements. However, 
what is missing with regard to the formulation concerning communist elements 
38
 Althusser, How to be a Marxist in Philosophy, p. 88 The paragraph ends with a strange 
invocation of universal whiteness. ‘I tell you, the reign of whiteness, which one will see in 
the whites of people’s eyes, the universal reign of whites, that is, of the white race, but all 
the races will be white [blanc], that is, all colours, and only the wise guys [blancs-becs, lit-
erally, white beaks] will have to watch their behaviour, unless they turn into Prince Charm-
ings [merles blancs, literally, white blackbirds]. What is more, all blackbirds will be white: 
black will be suppressed, along with all the mourning and suffering it is possible to avoid 
(Ibid., p. 88).
39
 Ibid., pp. 88–89.
40
 Ibid., p. 90.

129
from traces of communism to islets of communism
in Book on Imperialism is this idea of a ‘Long March’ of a processes of struggles, 
confrontations, and experimentation, as part of a transitional period of inten-
sified class struggles, which would also have as a starting point a revolutionary 
rupture.
It is true that in the second half of the 1970s Althusser often stressed the impor -
tance of initiatives of the masses. In his intervention in the debate at the 22
nd
 
Congress of the French Communist Party Althusser insisted on the importance of
restoring their voice to the masses who make history. Not just putting oneself ‘at 
the service of the masses’ (a slogan which may be pretty reactionary), but opening 
one’s ears to them, studying and understanding their aspirations and their con-
tradictions, their aspirations in their contradictions, learning how to be attentive 
to the masses’ imagination and inventiveness.
41
However, at the same time Althusser also concentrated on another crucial aspect 
that perhaps can explain the imagery of the margin. This is the fact that many of 
the popular initiatives that represented for him a hopeful way out of the crisis of 
the communist movement were happening outside the official parties and trade 
unions. This poses a grave problem for him, in both the East and the West.
In the East as in the West we are confronted with the grave problem of the rela-
tion existing between these organizations and the State: with the problem, in the 
East, of the fusion of these organizations with the State, an open fusion; with the 
problem, in the West, of the risk of fusion, because the bourgeois State never stops 
trying to integrate the organizations of class struggle of the working class into its 
own operations, often with success.
42
 
Consequently, Althusser in the same text, the text of his 1977 Venice interven -
tion on the crisis of Marxism, insists that this is the crucial question:
And above all – the most important of questions for past and future – how can 
relations be established with the mass movement which, transcending the tradi-
41
 Louis Althusser, “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party”, New 
Left Review (July 1977), p. 11.
42
 Louis Althusser, “The Crisis of Marxism”, Marxism Today (July 1978), p. 220.

130
panagiotis sotiris
tional distinction between trade union and party, will permit the development of 
initiatives among the people, which usually fail to fit into the division between 
the economic and political spheres (even ‘added together’)? Because we are wit-
nessing more and more mass movements of the people arising by themselves, 
outside of the trade unions and parties, bringing – or capable of bringing – some-
thing indispensable to the struggle. In short, how can we properly respond to the 
demands and expectations of the masses of the people?
43
So one might say that this increased importance of the imagery of the margin 
is one way for Althusser to suggest the difficulty posed by the fact that the au-
tonomous initiatives of the masses emerge outside the traditional organization 
and political forms associated with the working class movement, thus making 
it even harder to actually think how it is possible to transform the elements for 
communism into a transitional process. Thus, the reference to communist forms 
actually emerging in the margins or interstices or the reference to communist 
islets is one way to emphasize the dynamic of these elements, even in a manner 
that seemingly at least overlooks the question of the organizational forms. Or 
one might suggest that this is exactly Althusser’s way of pointing to the radical 
political and organizational novelty and ingenuity required to actually trans-
form the ‘traces of communism’ into a feasible strategy for communism.
Islets of communism
However, he, at least in some of his texts and interventions, seems to turn more 
towards this conception of communism already existing in the interstices of 
contemporary societies. A 1980 letter offers an almost poetic vision of an al -
ready existing communism in those practices and relations that escape the 
commodity relation.
I am in Greece with friends. In Athens. What a wonderful country: the beauty of 
the city under the sun, and now the storm: a splendour, I see the city from the 
apartment, and I am listening to Beethoven’s 7
th
 Symphony on the radio. Only 
the sea, the islands, and the beach are missing. The woman I love is with me. 
Friends will come, wonderful. I am happy and communism is within reach.
43
 Ibid.

131
from traces of communism to islets of communism
Communism exists today in all places where
1) there is no commodity relation
2) therefore no economic exploitation
3) therefore no political domination
4) therefore no ideological servitude or intimidation
It exists everywhere in the world, in the islets of friendship (between all the 
friends that love each other and talk about what interests them, between all the 
children that play, between all the men that play football or other games where 
it is about winning by respecting the rules of the game, without hurting anyone. 
Communism is respect for others, when all relations of exploitation, domination 
and intimidation have been suppressed or suspended.
44
The same tone emerges in all the accounts we have from Althusser’s interven-
tion in a debate at Terni in Italy again in 1980. Chistian Lo Iacono has attempted 
to offer a reconstruction of this intervention by looking at the reports in various 
newspapers.
On 4 April 1980 one can read in the Italian newspapers various accounts of a 
debate that took place during the “Study days at the Paris Commune”, organized 
by political and artistic collectives of the Terni steelworks. Althusser took part 
in them with his old friend Cesare Luporini. The film recording has been lost, 
but there are reports of extensive segments, the most significant. In any case, 
a comparative reading of the different newspapers leaves no doubt as to what 
Althusser said. He overwhelms his listeners with a radicalism that, according 
to witnesses, overflows into delirium. They describe a frenetic Althusser as he 
waits to take the floor. He poses as an interpreter who almost disappears be-
hind the ‘voices’ and ‘actions’ of which he is the bearer. The protagonists are 
the mass movements that all over the world play on a political scene completely 
different than that dominated by the system of representation, be it democratic 
or bureaucratic. Despite the insufficient documentation at our disposal, it is very 
clear that he had an idea of politics far removed from that of the slow activity of 
institutional transformation. Above all, there is the idea of the paradox of poli-
tics, of its impossibility (indeed, the Machiavellian idea of “occupying the place 
44
 Louis Althusser in William S. Lewis, « Sur un voyage en Grèce”, 2018, available at: https://
www.imec-archives.com/papiers/william-lewis/.

132
panagiotis sotiris
of the impossible”). “Never,” he said, “in history has there been verified such a 
favourable situation as the present [...]. The military forces of the great powers 
[...] cancel each other out, mutually paralyze each other; Western communist 
parties and workers’ organizations are at an impasse, cannot move, therefore, 
the space for revolution is free: the only thing is to know what we want, and to 
want it by thinking reality as it is.”
45
And again we have the image of communism already existing everywhere, and 
of the islets of communism already existing in the interstices of society. 
Communism exists “everywhere – even here, today, in Terni, or in a church, or 
on a field where football is played – there where real relationships, are created, 
islets of communism characterized by three conditions: no economic exploita-
tion, no pressure from political power, no ideological servitude.” “Otherwise,” 
Althusser adds, “socialism is crap.” Communism is not eclipsed, on the contra-
ry, “the future is played in our head,” on condition of defeating all “paper ti-
gers,” all “misconceptions.”
46
The similarity between the citations in the journalistic reports and the letter 
mentioned above suggests that the reports are rather accurate. Moreover, we 
also have similar references in his interview with RAI 30 of April 1980.
47
 In 
a certain way, this idea of already existing communism in the islets of com-
munism emerging in contemporary capitalist societies combined with this em-
phasis on the actual strength of popular initiatives (a recurring theme in his 
interventions from that period) is Althusser’s ‘bending the stick to the other 
side. It represents Althusser’s attempt to escape the difficulty of rethinking the 
political, theoretical, and ideological conditions in order to overcome the deep 
crisis of the existing communist parties and mass organisations. 
45
 Christian Lo Iacono, “Un amour compliqué avec les marxismes dissidents italiens”, 2015, 
available at : La Pensée 382, https://www.cairn.info/revue-la-pensee-2015-2-page-139.htm.
46
 Ibid.
47
 Louis Althusser, “The Crisis of Marxism: An interview with Louis Althusser”, trans. Ron 
Salaj, 2017, available at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3312-the-crisis-of-marxism-
an-interview-with-louis-althusser.

133
from traces of communism to islets of communism
The margin and underdetermination
To return to the imagery of the margin, it is interesting how Althusser also linked 
it to the notion of underdetermination. Here is a relevant reference in a 1984 
letter to Fernanda Navarro:
Of course there are, as you say, ‘possibilities’ within social determination, if only 
because there are several different orders of social determination and because this 
creates a play – of gaps, blank spaces, or margins in which the subject may find 
his path determined or not determined by social constraints; but this non-determi-
nation is an effect, a sub-effect, of determination, of determinations; what I called 
not only overdetermination, but underdetermination ... Do you see what I mean?
48
For Althusser, the notion of underdetermination refers exactly to the uneven 
character of class struggle and antagonism and how the working class is not just 
the opposite of the capitalist class.
[I]f you take seriously the nature of the Marxist whole and its unevenness, you must 
come to the conclusion that this unevenness is necessarily reflected in the form of 
the overdetermination or of the underdetermination of contradiction. […] [C]ontra-
diction, as you find it in Capital, presents the surprising characteristic of being 
uneven, of bringing contrary terms into operation which you cannot obtain just by 
giving the second a sign obtained by negating that of the first. This is because they 
are caught up in a relation of unevenness which continuously reproduces its con-
ditions of existence just on account of this contradiction. […] Because the working 
class is not the opposite of the capitalist class, it is not the capitalist class negated, 
deprived of its capital and its powers – and the capitalist class is not the working 
class plus something else, namely riches and power. They do not share the same 
history, they do not share the same world, they do not lead the same class struggle, 
and yet they do come into confrontation, and this certainly is a contradiction since 
the relation of confrontation reproduces the conditions of confrontation instead of 
transcending them in a beautiful Hegelian exaltation and reconciliation.
49
48
 Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–86, trans. G.M. Goshgar-
ian, Verso, London 2006, p. 236.
49
 Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Locke, New Left Books, London 
1976 , pp. 184–5.

134
panagiotis sotiris
Étienne Balibar has suggested that this ‘enigmatic’ reference in the 1975 
Soutenance d’ Amiens must be read as suggesting a philosophical programme to 
think, besides the “necessity of contingency,” also “the contingent of this contin-
gence, the ‘under-determined’ multiplicity of possibles or tendencies that coexist 
within the same event.”50 I think that apart from the broader implications that 
the notion of underdetermination has for any theorization of historical dynamics 
that do not manage to reach a certain threshold of determination, it also points to 
the very unevenness and difficulty of any attempt to transform subaltern resist-
ances and aspirations into a historical initiative capable of social change. 
The inescapable tension 
In this sense and contrary to some of Althusser’s more enthusiastic passages, 
the communist elements at the interstices or the margins and the islets of com-
munism point to both the possibility and impossibility of communism. They 
point to dynamics that are constantly reproduced, but also to counter-dynamics 
and political, ideological, and institutional obstacles thereto, beginning with 
the very weight of previous defeats. This can explain both the constant observa-
tion of such traces of communism and at the same time all of the effects of the 
miscognition, disorientation, disillusionment, and disaggregation of the subal-
tern classes and groups.
That is why it is important to stress the tension running through such referenc-
es by Althusser and how they point to both an actual attempt to rethink com-
munism as the limit of class antagonism and of the constant resistance and 
struggle inscribed at the heart of the capitalist relation of production, and to a 
certain desire to bypass the complex political labour of creating the conditions 
to turn these elements into new social forms and relations, i.e. all the effort as-
sociated with assembling the modern Prince and rethinking transition as both 
struggle and experimentation. 
If we could discuss this tension in another way, we could say that on the one 
hand we have Althusser trying to expand his original politico-theoretical project 
of recreating the possibility of a fusion between the working class and Marxism, 
50
 Étienne Balibar, “ Avant-propos”, in Louis Althusser, Pour Marx, La Découverte/Poche, Pa-
ris 1996, p. xiii.

135
from traces of communism to islets of communism
by means of a radical renewal of the communist movement, even in the sense 
of new movements outside official communist parties. On the other hand, the 
realisation of the extent of the rupture between the subaltern classes and both 
Marxist theory and communist political organisations led Althusser to a con-
ception of the encounter as almost chance, including the imagery of islets of 
communism, which is closer to Derrida’s suggestion of an eschatology without 
teleology than to a non-teleological materialism of the encounter. Here is how 
Derrida puts it:
To this extent, the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the 
communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely 
undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-
come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated. [...] 
It would be easy, too easy, to show that such a hospitality without reserve, which 
is nevertheless the condition of the event and thus of history (nothing and no one 
would arrive otherwise, a hypothesis that one can never exclude, of course), is 
the impossible itself, and that this condition of possibility of the event is also its 
condition of impossibility, like this strange concept of messianism without content, 
of the messianic without messianism, that guides us here like the blind. But it 
would be just as easy to show that without this experience of the impossible, one 
might as well give up on both justice and the event. That would be still more just or 
more honest. One might as well give up also on whatever good conscience one still 
claims to preserve. One might as well confess the economic calculation and de-
clare all the checkpoints that ethics, hospitality, or the various messianisms would 
still install at the borders of the event in order to screen the arrivant.
51
However interesting Derrida’s attempt to rethink an eschatological although 
non-teleological conception of communism is, it is obvious that we are moving 
beyond the idea of a political process elaborating and transforming social dy-
namics and struggles into a transitional process and strategy for communism. 
This can also be considered to be an indication of the tensions and limits of 
Althusser’s thinking within the context of the philosophy of the encounter.
51
 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New 
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, London 2006 , pp. 81–82. See the discussion 
in Étienne Balibar, ‘Eschatology versus Teleology: The Suspended Dialogue between Der-
rida and Althusser’, in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne 
Guerlac, Duke University Press, Durham 2009.

136
panagiotis sotiris
It is the same tension that we find in Althusser’s constant return to Machiavelli. 
On the one hand, Machiavelli, for Althusser, is an attempt to rethink the very 
idea of a new practice of politics that is able to deal with the complexity of the 
conjuncture, both its overdetermination and underdetermination, in order to 
create the conditions for a radical change in the relation of forces. On the other 
hand, there is a conception of radical and emancipatory politics as pure novelty, 
as a radically novel political gesture, a solitary political act that initiates a new 
political sequence.
52
Althusser never published Machiavelli and Us. Perhaps this had to do with these 
tensions. Perhaps it was the weight of the realisation that the need for a politics 
of radical novelty and the creation of the conditions for fortunate encounters 
between struggles, strategy, and social dynamics could only be answered by a 
painful and thorough recomposition of the political organisations of the work-
ing class, a task well beyond a simple call for a left-wing turn of the actually ex-
isting communist movement and also beyond simply investing in the expansion 
of already existing islets of communism.
In a certain sense, Althusser’s references to traces or elements of communism 
point to both an indispensable starting point for any strategy for communism 
and all the open questions associated with the very idea of a political practice 
with a communist horizon. Retracing the tensions running through Louis Al-
thusser’s confrontation with these questions is also a way to rethink a challenge 
that is more actual and urgent than ever.
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 On these tensions see Panagiotis Sotiris, A Philosophy for Communism. Rethinking Althuss-
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137
from traces of communism to islets of communism
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