We need to replace the discipline of economics. The watershed idea of Marx’s historical materialism is that a mode of production «is a definite social form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite way of life on their part». Splitting a mode of production from its social form and purpose, from the way of life integral to it—as economics intends to do—is a bad abstraction. In taking the impossible economy-in-general as its object of inquiry, economics is caught in «the illusion of the economic». Replacing economics involves renewing Marx’s scientifc revolution by investigating the social form and purpose of capitalist production.