On July 16, during the U.S. State Department's Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered one of the most openly anti-communist speeches heard from a senior American official in years.
Speaking before representatives from more than sixty countries, Rubio declared that communism envisions "a world without courage, without creativity or ambition, without heroes or glory... without God." He went even further, portraying Marxist revolutionaries as ideological companions of terrorists and urging a renewed international campaign against what he called "far-left political terrorism."
The chief of U.S. foreign policy claims that communism envisions a world "without heroes." Nothing could better illustrate the poverty of anti-communist thought. Capitalism has always needed heroes because it has never trusted ordinary people. Its history is populated by presidents, billionaires, generals and entrepreneurs—the "great men" supposedly responsible for every leap of civilization. The rest of humanity is reduced to the role of spectators, expected to admire those who rule rather than recognize their own power to shape history.
Marxism overturned that entire mythology. It committed the unforgivable crime of telling workers that they—not presidents, billionaires or kings—are the makers of history. That is the one lesson every ruling class fears above all others. A society convinced that history belongs to extraordinary individuals will always wait for another saviour. A working class that discovers it can become the subject of history instead of its object no longer asks for permission to change the world. Communism does not abolish heroism; it transfers it from the few to the many.
Rubio also accuses communism of extinguishing ambition. But that depends entirely on how one defines the word. In the moral universe of capitalism, ambition means climbing above others: accumulating wealth, owning more property, controlling corporations, dominating markets and, eventually, entire nations. Success is measured not by what one contributes to society, but by how much one possesses. A system built on competition cannot imagine ambition except as the relentless pursuit of private gain.
Marxism proposes a radically different standard. It has no admiration for the ambition to enrich oneself through another person's labour or to build fortunes from exploitation. Its ambition is collective rather than individual: to abolish poverty instead of profiting from it, to eliminate exploitation rather than manage it, and to place the wealth created by society under society's own control. Rubio confuses the rejection of greed with the rejection of ambition. In doing so, he exposes one of anti-communism's deepest assumptions: that without inequality, human beings would have nothing left to strive for.
The U.S Secretary of State argues that communism is a world "without creativity." That accusation rests on one of capitalism's oldest illusions: the belief that those who own are the same people who create. In the capitalist imagination, creativity is measured by patents, trademarks and corporate success. If an invention bears the name of a multinational corporation, it is celebrated as innovation. If it makes a billionaire even richer, it becomes proof of individual genius.
Reality tells a different story. Every bridge, railway, hospital, power plant, factory and research laboratory is the product of collective human labour. Scientists make discoveries, engineers turn ideas into reality, workers build the world with their hands, and teachers educate the generations that make further progress possible. Yet once the work is done, capital arrives to claim ownership, register the patent and collect the profit. Capitalism has mastered the art of appropriating creativity while convincing society that it created it.
Marxism begins from the opposite premise. Creativity is not the privilege of investors or shareholders; it is the collective capacity of humanity to transform nature, expand knowledge and reshape society itself. The real question, then, is not whether communism values creativity, but why capitalism insists on confusing creation with ownership.
Rubio laments that communism envisions a world "without God." Yet his criticism raises a more fundamental question: can a society truly exist without something it regards as absolute? Capitalism answered that question long ago. It did not abolish religion; it merely replaced its object. The invisible hand became an infallible force, the market its supreme judge, profit its highest moral principle. What cannot be justified ethically is declared economically necessary, as though the verdict of the market were beyond human judgment.
Every religion has demanded sacrifice. Capitalism is no exception. Its victims are not offered on stone altars but through unemployment, austerity, poverty and war. Workers lose their livelihoods, pensioners their dignity and entire nations their sovereignty, all in the name of restoring "market confidence." Financial institutions issue the verdicts, governments enforce them and society is told that no alternative exists. Such is the theology of capital.
Marxism rejects that fatalism. It insists that markets are human institutions, not natural laws, and that economic systems should serve people rather than command them. The U.S. Secretary of State treats this refusal to bow before capital as hostility toward religion. In reality, what Marxism rejects is the elevation of any social order to the status of something sacred and beyond challenge. That is precisely why it remains intolerable to those whose power depends on convincing humanity that capitalism is not merely an economic system, but destiny itself.
Among Rubio's many clichés, perhaps none is more revealing than his claim that communism is "grey." One is tempted to ask: compared to what? To the dazzling spectacle of consumer capitalism, where every billboard promises happiness, every screen demands attention and every desire is instantly transformed into another commodity? Rubio mistakes colour for consumption because he has been taught that abundance is measured by what fills shop windows rather than by what enriches human life.
If there is a truly grey civilization, it is one in which millions spend decades inside glass office towers producing wealth they will never own. It is a world where friendship gives way to networking, education becomes an investment, healthcare a business, culture a marketing strategy and even loneliness another commercial opportunity. The colours may be brighter, the advertisements larger and the products more abundant, but behind the spectacle lies a monotonous reality: every aspect of life is ultimately reduced to its exchange value.
Communism never promised a society overflowing with commodities. It promised something far more radical: a society in which human beings would no longer be treated as commodities themselves. That is the distinction the U.S. Secretary of State cannot grasp. Having confused freedom with consumption, he mistakes the absence of endless shopping for the absence of life itself.
Rubio's attempt to equate Marxism with terrorism deserves neither outrage nor astonishment. Every ruling class eventually develops a vocabulary through which opposition is stripped of its political character and recast as criminality. The labels change with the times, but the mechanism remains remarkably consistent. Those who challenged religious authority were branded heretics. Those who threatened monarchy became traitors. Trade unionists were denounced as agitators, socialists as subversives, anti-colonial movements as terrorists. The purpose has never been to describe political reality, but to deny that any legitimate resistance to the existing order can exist.
The same logic operates today. Once every revolutionary is defined as a terrorist, there is no longer any need to examine the conditions that produced revolt. Exploitation disappears from the discussion, imperial domination becomes international stability and resistance itself is transformed into the principal threat to civilization. Political conflict is reduced to a matter of law enforcement, while those who exercise violence through war, occupation or economic coercion are conveniently exempt from the labels they reserve for their opponents.
There is nothing original about this rhetoric. It is one of the oldest ideological devices in history: criminalize resistance, sanctify the existing order and call the result peace. Marco Rubio's speech tells us remarkably little about communism. It tells us a great deal about anti-communism.
Throughout his address, communism appears not as it has been understood by its supporters or critics, but as a projection of capitalism's own assumptions. Heroism is reduced to exceptional individuals, ambition to private accumulation, creativity to commercial success, freedom to consumer choice. Anything that falls outside those categories becomes not simply undesirable but literally unimaginable. Rubio's criticism therefore reveals less about Marxism than about the ideological limits of the system from which he speaks.
That is the real poverty of contemporary anti-communism. It no longer confronts socialism as a political theory or as a historical experience, with all its achievements, contradictions and failures. Instead, it argues against a caricature so detached from reality that it ultimately says more about its creator than its target. Having accepted capitalism as the natural horizon of human civilization, anti-communism has lost the ability to conceive that people might organize society according to fundamentally different principles.
This intellectual exhaustion becomes more visible with every passing crisis. As inequality deepens, wars multiply, public institutions erode and ecological destruction accelerates, the promise that capitalism represents the final stage of human progress becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. In such circumstances, anti-communism ceases to function as a confident political argument and begins to resemble something else: a ritual reaffirmation of beliefs whose persuasive power is steadily diminishing.
Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please." Rubio speaks as though history has already rendered its final verdict on capitalism and socialism alike. It has not. History remains unfinished—and so does humanity's struggle to build a society free from exploitation.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
