Abstract
Economics fails to recognize capital because it fails to make constitutive social forms ingredients of its theory. This is the crux of Marx’s critique of political economy. Because every mode of production has constitutive social forms, none can be understood apart from them. That is the breakthrough of historical materialism. In disregarding social forms, economics and social theories that adopt its horizon of discourse make phenomenological false moves resulting in pseudo-concepts. Since social forms carry moral, social, and political meaning, excluding them reduces social action to behavior, leading to a positivist exclusion of normative concerns. This exclusion cancels Marxian insights into subsumption, shadow forms, and fetishes. Marx’s critique of economics belongs to his critique of the “bourgeois horizon,” the mindset of much modern philosophy and social theory. The “bourgeois horizon” is established by false bifurcations such as subjective vs. objective, form vs. content, essence vs. appearance, and distribution vs. production.