The end of the social relations of capitalism does not mean the end of our passionate servitude. It does not by itself free us from the disorderly violence of desire and the efforts of power. It is perhaps on this precise point that the Spinozist realism of the passions is most useful to the Marxian utopia: as a sobering-up. The extinction of politics by the final dissolution of classes and the conflict between them, transcending all antagonisms by the victory of the working class, that non-class without any class interest, are post-political phantasmagoria, perhaps Marx’s deepest anthropological error, which consists in dreaming of a final eradication of violence – when there is no horizon except the search for the least destructive ways of organising it. Spinoza makes the point that if all people were wise, namely, led by reason, they would need neither laws nor political institutions. But wise is precisely what they are not, which is why they have no choice but to take into consideration the passionate movements of the conatus, which, of itself, ‘is not opposed to strifes, hatred, anger, treachery, or, in general, anything that appetite suggests. Neither the recommune nor transcending capitalism liberates us from this element of violence, nor does it exempt us from reinventing institutional regulations for it. That is why, if we use the word to mean radical liberation, we must recognise that communism is a long patience, a continuous effort, and perhaps only, to speak again like Kant, a regulative idea. Let us not even mention, in keeping with the illusions of subjectivity, a liberation in the sense of the sovereignty of a perfectly autonomous ego. Passionate exo-determination is our irremissible condition. Let us also not dream of the final abolition of relations of dependence. It is impossible for the interest of one to never have to pass through another, and that no effect of domination would follow: love-interests, whether in erotic form or that of the desire for recognition, pass by their very nature through chosen others, individual or collective. These desires-interests, the very expression of the amorous logic of the conatus and of its passionate servitude, imperiously and at times violently cut a path for themselves, and neither transformations in the forms of ownership nor the generalisation of associative relations could fully disarm them. If true communism consists in living ex ductu rationis, it is better to recognise that it is a horizon and forego early the illusions of the radiant society.