Abstract: Professor Hu Jun has been upholding and claiming for many years that the “labor exchange of equal amount”in the distribution according to work is the nature of socialist economic relations, as opposed to the exchange of equal value, so as to exclude the view on commodity exchange relationship, which cannot be established. This theoretical point of view of him is against Marx’s. The labor exchange of equal amount in the distribution according to work is, according to what Marx said, the“bourgeois right”as the same principle of the commodity exchange of equal value, being one of the“defects”associated with the “traces of the old society”. This view is also mutually exclusive with Deng Xiaoping’s socialist essentialism. Professor Hu employs the essentialism of socialist“labor exchange of equal amount”to deny the real existence of the value relationship of commodity in China, asserting that the scientific truth about the demise of commodity relations under the socialist system proposed by Marx and Engels has become a reality in China. This is not consistent with China’s actual situation. Professor Hu claimed that this theoretical point of view has won a great deal of attention and recognition from both the Party and academia as“the most outstanding innovative idea”and“important academic contribution”, and has“provided theoretical groundwork”and“made theoretical preparations”for Deng Xiaoping’s socialist market economic theory and China’s reform objectives, this does not conform to the facts either.

Key words: distribution according to work; labor exchange of equal amount; commodity exchange of equal value; the nature of socialism; socialist market economy