In Marx, Revolution, and Social Democracy Philip Kain offers an erudite and persuasive account of Marx as a social democrat. The book argues (1) that Marx’s philosophy of communism is a critique of political and economic alienation—not primarily an account of social domination or exploitation (pp. 20–27); (2) that Marx’s writings as a whole evince a set of distinctions about revolution, namely minority vs. majority revolution and political vs. social revolution (pp. 58–121); (3) that Leninist practice rode roughshod of these distinctions, which is why it ended up erecting a putschist authoritarian regime, instead of a form of social democracy (pp. 66–75).

Against Leninist authoritarianism, Kain argues that Marxian social democracy prioritizes social over political revolution. The former includes the ways in which socialism grows within the womb of capitalism—what G.A. Cohen dubbed the obstetric motif—through reforms within and against capitalism. Kain infers that common ownership of the means of production is beside the point. He concludes (4) that the Marxian critique of alienation makes room for markets, even capitalist markets, as long as these are adequately controlled by the social democratic state (pp. 125–146).

Since I agree with (3), I will here focus on tensions in the philosophical parts of the Kain’s book, namely the cogency of claim (1) and its consistency with claims (2) and (4). In a nutshell, I argue that Kain’s reading of Marxian alienation is either superfluous or piggybacks on a prior account of domination, while his insistence on an alienation-first theory is at odds with the book’s (otherwise correct) pro-socialist market argument.

I begin with Kain’s alienation-first theory. In the first chapter of Marx, Revolution, and Social Democracy, Kain attempts to retrieve a consistent account of fetishism from Marx’s economic and political writings. On Kain’s view, the young Marx asserts that:

If we do not control our products, if we are alienated from them…then, given a market, they will take on a life of their own…they will dominate and impoverish us. That is fetishism (p. 22).

A question that immediately jumps out of passages like this is: how can the net product dominate the direct producer? Surely Robinson Crusoe cannot dominate himself even if he is, in some sense, ‘alienated’ from his product—perhaps there’s an earthquake that destroys the coconuts he has been so laboriously gathering. The missing link here might be something like the exploitation of human by human. Kain demurs: ‘Exploitation is normally taken to be something one person, group, or class does to another, whereas alienation is something one does to oneself’ (p. 22). But then value, exploitation, domination, and the main categories of the critique of political economy seems to part ways with ‘alienation’.

Moreover, if Kain’s reading of Marx is correct, then Marx is inconsistent. For self-alienation is not objectionable if free. To alienate my apple in return for your pear is an expression of both our freedoms, not their restriction! And in fact Marx never denies this. Kain-style alienation is therefore at best a necessary but insufficient condition for a (Marxian) critique of capitalism. Kain is alert to the objection. In discussing the form of free association mentioned by Marx in section 4 of chapter 1 of Capital, vol. I, Kain writes:

[T]here would be no fetishism in [Marx’s] socialist market economy—because the workers there are associated such that production and distribution are collectively decided in accordance with a common social plan. They have come to understand and use the market as a means to achieve their own ends, rather than let it dominate them. This common plan allows the workers to control their market exchange so that it does not control them…. And so, market socialist and social democratic societies could eliminate fetishism as capitalism does not (p. 25, emphasis added).

But then mere alienation or fetishism is unproblematic. Indeed, we should go further: the fetishistic appearance of capitalist production—the relation between capital and labour appearing as a property of the objects of contractual agreement—is a necessary but insufficient condition for capitalist domination.

This vacillation between a domination-based and an alienation-based critique resurfaces in Kain’s discussion of socialist planning:

Could a social democratic society short of full socialism end fetishism?… It seems quite possible that a social democratic society could increase production, control the market, eliminate poverty, and so forth, well before full common ownership (p. 33).

But why should we merely ‘control the market’? The alienation argument suggests that any contractual arrangement between consenting adults is unjustified, as long as it makes market-determined consumption and production decisions opaque to the producers. Absurd though it sounds, the sum total of contractual arrangements—‘here’s an apple for your pear’—would seem objectionable on the alienation view. Domination, by contrast, presupposes that only uncontrolled market transactions, that is, market transactions that put the agency of some under the control of others, are unjustified. This not only makes better philosophical sense, but also explains Kain’s emphasis on ‘control’.

Similar ambiguity pervades Kain’s elaboration of Marx’s distinction between appearance and reality in Capital, vol. I. (p. 112f). That is, if the inverted appearance of capitalist exchange in the labour market is necessarily the appearance of freedom and equality, then that essence cannot be alienation—as opposed to unfreedom and inequality. Once again, alienation is insufficient for capitalist injustice.

What about social democratic planning? Kain’s book is most exciting when he follows Marx in finding optimism in dark places. For example, Kain follows Marx in thinking that the increasing concentration of capital, especially finance capital, makes the expropriation of the (financial) expropriators easier. It therefore makes the establishment of a democratic economy easier (pp. 115–119). But Kain does not explain why democracy, or democratic planning, may be desirable on the alienation view. For instance, in discussion of capitalist planning (e.g. inside large corporations like Walmart), Kain writes:

Capitalism is giving rise to socialism. Socialism is emerging within capitalism. What is left to do, we might say, even if oversimplified, is a subjective transformation…. We must…bring planning out into the open and democratize it (pp. 138–139).

Why should we ‘democratize it’? Why can’t the proletariat plan the realization of its own interests, Lukács-style, without democracy, without a concern for anyone’s rights, and without respect for the rights of its own members? The question only embarrasses the alienation view, not the domination view. In a similar vein, Kain recognizes that democratic planning is impossible without well-formed market prices (pp. 131–134). But how is market exchange compatible with non-alienation or non-fetishism? It is, after all, a condition of the possibility of a market transaction that it should appear as a relation between commodities—mere things. Once again, Kain’s normative lens distort his (correct) empirical judgments.

Now, one might agree with Kain that:

If within capitalism, the state must increasingly cooperate with corporations in planning, if this is necessary for those corporations to succeed, if this is necessary for the whole economy to function properly, and if at the same time capitalism is replacing individual ownership with socialized ownership and an increasingly large class of employed managers, and if, along with this, unions grow larger and more powerful, then it becomes increasingly difficult to hold that state assistance in planning serves only the capitalists…. The state would more and more be the executive committee of emerging socialism (p. 141).

Kain is right that this obstetric motif figures centrally in Marx’s discussion of transitional forms in Vol. III of Capital. But I doubt it supports, or is supported by, Kain’s alienation-first theory. More generally, the obstetric motif is a strange view to hold, in the midst of ubiquitous neoliberal crises. If anything, the room left for social democratic reconciliation between capital and labour seems to have shrunk due to lower growth rates (outside of India and China), ascending ruling class self-confidence and descending working class self-organization. Moreover, no developmental complementarity between capital concentration and labour socialization is visible at present. Indeed, the two magnitudes seem to be inversely related. So the obstetric motif may be an illusion. If it is, then we have reason to be less optimistic than Marx or Kain about the prospects of social revolution.

Consider an illustration: Kain wants to hold out for a social democracy facilitating something like the Swedish Meidner plan (pp. 132–135), i.e. Rudolf Meidner’s plan for reducing inequality in 1970s Sweden. But the history of neoliberalism since the 1970s has inverted Meidner: instead of giving workers an increasing share in productivity by eating into dividends (Meidner’s original plan), neoliberalism gives capitalists an increasing share in productivity by eating into wages. The fact that this inverted Meidnerism has survived, despite repeated attempts to revive social democracy, suggests that the social revolution envisaged in Marx, Revolution, and Social Democracy may never materialize, at least not without a political revolution preceding it. And that requires not some hazy notion of ‘alienation’, but rather a better understanding of how capitalism makes each of us unfree.