From his early economic works on, Marx conceived the labour of any kind of society as a set of production activities and analysed the historical modes of production as specific ways of distributing and exchanging these activities. Political economy on the contrary considers the labour only under...

The aim of this paper is to show how Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which stand as his first systematic study of classical economists, transform the concept of labour as it had been developed by political economy against mercantilism and physiocracy. The current...