He gets some of the Marx ideas wrong. Marx didn't want to end markets, he did want to end free markets based on profit. Kotkin also said that Marx wanted to end private property because that was a form of theft, but what Marx said was that private property OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION is a way of enclosuring the work in a way that people are obligated to be wage workers. If anyone is interested, go read about the law of enclosures in england which in many ways started the capitalist economic model. Also he said that everywhere this was tried led to violence and scarcity, which is partially true, but let's keep in mind that was the soviet union (not the US or any liberal democracy) that defeated the nazis. Let's also keep in mind that socialism is a threat to capitalism and countries that had revolutions stopped being exploited by other capitalist countries, so it's kind of expected that they would need to use violence too. Also, some places like Cuba achieved amazing things like erradicating infant deaths while at the same time suffering huge economic embargos. Cuba isn't on the UN hunger map while my country (Brazil, which is capitalist) has 40 million people in hunger and many more in food insecurity. Our police kills and dies A LOT and somehow this doesn't account for capitalist deaths, but when someone dies in socialism/communism then it's all in the account of the ideology.