This article reappraises Marx’s views on labour exchange and elucidates their present-day significance compared with neoclassical thought. Marx’s writings, especially his pre-Capital drafts since the Grundrisse, contain descriptions that imply a potential of distinction between labour power and labour that differs from his doctrine of surplus value. In them, Marx highlighted the capitalistic worker’s subjectivity towards labour performance and indicated the variability in the content of labour resulting from it and employer countermeasures. This variability in concrete useful labour precludes the market determination of capitalistic labour exchange and necessitates socio-political intervention in it and therefore in production and distribution in general. Thus, Marx’s views could provide a forceful counterargument to the neoclassical thought on labour exchange. Marx’s anti-neoclassical perspective on labour exchange also affords a key clue to the understanding of the present-day labour situation. It can be concluded that Marx’s descriptions that imply a labour power-labour distinction in terms of concrete useful labour could be conducive to a demonstration of the indivisibility of economic and socio-political domains observed by Marx himself and the fallacy of neoclassical economists’ advocacy of their separation in present-day contexts
