ABSTRACT
Before 1956, Ron Meek was a rigid dogmatist. It was his leg that I was pulling in ‘An Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist’. 1 He took it very much amiss, and it was still rankling when he was writing the original version of this book, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value. His extremely high standard of doctrinal purity was shown by the fact that he treated Oskar Lange and Rudolf Schlesinger (both life-long students of Marx) as hostile critics, along with me. Lange was suggesting that some problems that arise within a market economy can best be treated by orthodox methods, and Schlesinger was pleading to relax the strict quantitative calculation of the ‘transformation of values into prices’ in order to deal with monopoly. These suggestions were dismissed as heretical. I did not intend my Essay on Marxian Economics (1942) as a criticism of Marx. I wrote it to alert my bourgeois colleagues to the existence of penetrating and important ideas in Capital that they ought not to continue to neglect. In this the book had-some success, which it certainly would not have done if it had been written in Marxist terminology, but since I was a bourgeois myself I must have been trying to reconstruct orthodox equilibrium theory. (In fact, that book was the first round in the ‘Cambridge criticism’ which, with the aid of Piero Sraffa, finally pulverized equilibrium theory twenty years later.)
