The discourse on market or that of exchange is the area of interest of Marx's analysis and critique. He re-examines existing categories like commodity, use value, exchange value through a conceptual framework which is flexible and transformable in course of enquiry.( a benchmark of discourse theory to be formulated a century after) It is not that he first develops a theoretical framework and then apply it to the existing social practice which is like' learning to swim before getting into water'.

Though in the previous post i pointed out that there is a discourse theory approach in the Marxian analysis and and in a way prefigures it, there is one fundamental difference which i want to point out. Marx sets out with his analysis from a purely economic standpoint, and in course of the investigation invokes the social through introduction of categories like class, working class etc. and relates them in purely economic terms. He knits the social and the economic in his analysis but maintains other domains like the political and cultural as separate reified categories which are consequences of the first two. This ontological separation between different types of social practices (which enables multiple subject positions with which a social agent can identify) whether understood as ideological, political, cultural etc. is well maintained in his analysis. The base- superstructure model clearly demonstrates this demarkation. Such a treatment involving separation of various social domains is against the basic axioms of discourse analysis which affirms the discursive character of all social practices and objects in the active process of interaction and interplay of changing relations and rejects a mode of analysis which treats them as separate domains of human activity.