Rubio Says ‘Spirit of Marx’ Lives on After Soviet Communism’s Defeat

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a conservative legal audience in Washington on Friday that the defeat of Soviet communism did not end what he called “the spirit of Marx.”

“Even as we defeated the institution of Soviet communism, we did not triumph over the spirit of Marx,” Rubio said, according to the official State Department transcript.

“That spirit of Marx, it lives.”

Marx’s Legacy After the Cold War

He delivered the lines in his prepared keynote, the 25th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture, at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in the Mayflower Hotel on Nov. 13.

The passage was not part of the later question-and-answer session, which included separate remarks on North Korea and Iran.

“It lives on in these new forms and doctrines, which would subordinate the national will to the menial consensus of the world,” Rubio said.

He added: “Marxism sought to abolish the distinctions between men. The radicals of our time seek to abolish the distinctions between nations themselves.”

International Law and National Will

Immediately before those lines, Rubio said a “leveling and pessimistic spirit of the age” was enticing Americans to “relinquish responsibility for our own destiny” and to “seek refuge in these glittering generalities of international law.”

He placed the argument in a broader attack on what he called the weaponization of international law and the influence of “soulless global bureaucrats.”

A Fox News preview of the prepared text, obtained before the speech, already included the “spirit of Marx” language, which appears in the official transcript of the delivered remarks.

The address was Rubio’s first major domestic speech after the 2026 midterm elections, at a convention held under the theme “Celebrating 250 Years of American Exceptionalism.”

A Question of National Identity

“The ultimate question of our time is whether Americans have a moral right to exist as a distinct nation and a distinct people, and thus to demand a government that defends and pursues our interests above all else,” he said.

Rubio criticized claims that Americans are “living on stolen land” and that the country was “founded and built upon slavery and genocide and oppression.”

He said those arguments show that their authors do not believe Americans have such a right, and that they would have the West atone through “total surrender,” including by opening borders, renouncing laws and retreating from the world.

Rubio has also been at the center of a separate Washington fight over China policy after a CIA report on Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was leaked.

The State Department later published the full transcript of the Mayflower address.