Abstract
How much wealth is there? How is wealth distributed? Discourse about wealth lacks a third question: What is the specific social form and purpose of wealth? Excluding social form—not specialization—narrows economic topics. Marx’s phenomenological claim that wealth always has a specific social form and purpose is the seminal insight of historical materialism. Wealth, a general term for useful things, is not a bad abstraction. To be general, wealth must be conceptually thin, that is, poor. Economics takes its categories to be general; they have no social, moral, or political weight. Public purpose is lost when the normative dimensions of capitalist social forms are ignored. There is no wealth-in-general, and there is no corresponding general science of wealth. Economists advertise an impossible general social science but leap in with capitalist forms: the commodity, money, wage-labor, profit, interest, and rent. Wealth is a poor concept so economists must bait and switch.