> My question: an oft repeated refrain, when Marx is touted as a reasonable alternative, is that any time anyone tried his ideas out, it was a total disaster (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez).

I've not read Marx, nor am I a Marxist, but my understanding is that most of his work is a diagnosis of a problem, not a plan for a cure. IIRC, Marx's own "plan" was basically more capitalism harder until it collapses and something ill-defined without its problems emerges from the ashes. Those people you cite (assuming they even wanted to improve anything rather than amass personal power), can probably be thought as a doctor who could correctly diagnose cancer but proposed a incorrect theory for a cure (e.g. something based on the four humors). Their failure to cure cancer doesn't mean the patient didn't have cancer or that cancer can't be cured.

That's correct. Most of the implementations of Marx's ideas are heavily derived through Lenin, who wrote more thoroughly about how to actually run a post-capitalist society and what would/wouldn't work.

Just to note, also, Chavez is the only person in that list who wasn't a Marxist-Leninist, and it's not helpful to understanding to include him in that list.

I don't think that analogy works: many people never get cancer which means we have a clear model for what a healthy, cancer-free life form looks like. "Curing cancer" just means returning a body to this healthy, pre-cancerous state.

But we have no model for what a healthy, capitalism-free society would look like. Every attempt at removing capitalism from the system has led to totalitarian results.

This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.

> But we have no model for what a healthy, capitalism-free society would look like. Every attempt at removing capitalism from the system has led to totalitarian results.

That's not quite accurate, since capitalism hasn't always existed and markets haven't haven't always been the primary means of exchange. There's also a fairly broad range of capitalist systems with different trade offs. We also don't know if capitalism won't also ultimately lead to totalitarian results.

In these discussions, we also probably need to make a distinction between capitalism and markets. You could perhaps have a society that keeps markets more-or-less as they are but "removes capitalism" by implementing a different relationship between labor and ownership, for instance.

> This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.

I dispute the latter point. It's kinda like saying the failure of the iAPX 432 and Itanium strongly suggests there's no better alternative to the x86 architecture. In this case, I don't think we have much understanding about what's unknown.

> My question: an oft repeated refrain, when Marx is touted as a reasonable alternative, is that any time anyone tried his ideas out, it was a total disaster (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez).

A couple things. Chavez is of a different category from the other three just on the amount of death under the other regimes. The question of the results of socialism and capitalism is complex. It's worth reading both historical and economically focused works to get a more nuanced view than the one that you've laid out. For a few suggestions:

On historical critiques of the US-centric perspective:

The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins

The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad

A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Economic works:

Competing Economic Theories, Richard Wolff

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, David Harvey

There are more authors (Kliman, Moseley, Shaikh, etc.), but these two would be a good start.

These are works with particular perspectives and should be read as such. If you want competing ideological works, read a standard history book and Hayek, Mises, Friedman, etc.

As others have already stated, "Das Kapital" itself is a study and criticism of capitalism, and does not present much in terms of alternatives or "solutions".

It is worth noting that both Marx and Engels were in favour of democracy, even going as far as saying that the actual means of production should be democratized. Both would probably be appalled by what became of their theories under Stalin and Mao...

Also, as Marx got older he got less and less political active, there is even a letter where he refused to be seen as a leading figure of the communist movement. Das Kapital is from this later period of his life, and subsequently very scant on noneconomic politics...

I've seen some decent refutations of that kind of thinking by Chomsky himself. I don't have a great recommendation just because my eyes tend to glaze over when people start droning on about how xyz would be nice but iT's NoT hUmAn nAtURe.

Also, I don't know how anybody could say that kind of thing about Marx, specifically Das Kapital, which is what I'm most familiar with. It doesn't delve much into human nature, it's all about modes of production and exchange and labor value.

You mention Pinker, that opens question whether you've met with work of Nicolas Taleb. He is not Marxist per se, one could say he's the opposite, but he is an ardent opponent of Pinker and his kind of reasoning, so his books could've challenged Pinker's opinion on these topics as well.

Taleb has attacked Pinker only on some technical statistics issues related to trends in violence post-Enlightenment and maybe merits of IQ.

Taleb leans libertarian on large scales himself.