ABSTRACT
After Marx’s death, in 1883, Engels undertook the major task of patching together the second and third volumes of Capital. Whereas volume 2 slipped out into the public domain in 1885 like a battleship leaving port in the middle of the night, volume 3 was launched in the full glare of public scrutiny. In his introduction to volume 2, Engels set a famous essay prize, in which scholars were invited to come up with their own solution to the transformation problem: the problem of how values can be transformed into prices. When volume 3 was finally published in 1894 it became, and still is, the subject of intense controversy. Critics argued that Marx failed to correctly transform capital inputs from values to prices. This claim, that Marx’s transformation solution is inconsistent and wrong, has become the Achilles heel of Marxian economics. Marxists have sought for the last 100 years to defend the labour theory of value against the charge of inconsistency.
