Jerry: ___________________________________________________________________________ Well, after some on this list read the above, I have no doubt that we are going to be discussing FROP for some time! Putting aside the analogy to sex (which for me, at least, is a more stimulating field than FROP), Alan's statement that FRP is "what happens, it's what Marx says, and its theoretically consistent" needs to be explained rather than asserted. ___________________________________________________________________________ More than happy. But it breaks two ways: the following assertions without explanation could also do with more cautious uttering: (1) Marx has been definitively proved wrong on FROP (2) Marx's solution to the transformation problem was wrong. The point is, there's an argument. Valid and general refutations of the assertion that Marx was wrong about FROP have been around since Alberro and Persky(1981), followed by Ernst (1982), Kliman (1988) and the new stuff we are bringing out. Refutations of the 'assertion' that Marx was wrong on transformation have been around since Wolff-Callari-Roberts (1982) and supplemented or complemented in various ways by Langston, Carchedi, Naples, Andrews, Kliman/McGlone, Giussani, Moseley, Freeman, Ramos-Rodriguez, and I apologise (plus please get in touch) for anyone I've missed. One of the reasons for the formation of the International Working Group on Value Theory and the EEA mini-conferences is that the treatment these emerging views have had from academia is a wall of silence. This is in my view a sufficient body of scholarly (and so far unanswered) material for categorical or off-the-cuff statements that 'it is well-known' Marx was wrong to be at least as out of order as statements to the contrary. That's all we ask. Is that fair or is that fair? Alan
