"Communism works in theory" is a phrase we often hear in modern discussions of Karl Marx's economics, and it concedes valuable ideological ground to the left every time it's repeated. It's a line some conservatives still reach for, almost reflexively. It's time that changed, because even the claim that communism works in theory is plainly false.
In a speech Thursday announcing a global crackdown on left-wing terrorism, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made exactly that argument: communism does not even work in theory. Socialism and communism, by their very nature, require the centralization of power, the destruction of the individual, and the abolition of private property, the very institution that has been instrumental to the development of the West and the greatest nations on Earth. Even as an abstraction, communism is the antithesis of nearly everything Americans have historically believed in.
🚨 Sec. Marco Rubio just NAILED IT:
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 16, 2026
"One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is that it 'sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.'"
"That's actually NOT TRUE. Communism does NOT sound good in theory. The world that envisions for all of us is small,… pic.twitter.com/iKnXenuutq
"One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That's actually not true," the secretary of state said. "Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God."
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"For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it's an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy."
The world communism builds is one obsessed with material distribution and nothing else. It carries no drive to advance humanity's future; it seeks only to freeze the economy in place and guarantee everyone an identical, bare-minimum standard of living, dictated by the state under socialism, and by the collective under communism. Strip away the terminology, and both are little more than a costume: authoritarianism wearing one mask, mob rule wearing the other. Neither is compatible with individual rights, political freedom, or economic freedom.
It is, in the end, an almost childishly oversimplified view of what a society is for, the idea that material comfort and leisure are the only things worth organizing a civilization around, and that economics is nothing more than a distribution problem to be solved and forgotten.
Rubio's point is a reminder that communism's failure was never an accident of poor execution, it was baked into the premise from the start. A system built to erase ambition, courage, and the individual was never going to produce anything worth wanting, in theory or otherwise. The tragedy is that it took a century, tens of millions of lives, and the ruins of a dozen nations for the world to learn what should have been obvious from the very first page of the theory itself.
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