"What is the easiest and most painless way to become familiar with these law of value controversies?"
I don't think there is any GOOD way. The *easiest* thing is to look at the 2 volume _History of Marxian Economics_ by MC Howard and JE King (WWI is the dividing point between the 2 vols.), but I find it to be a tendentious and very incomplete work. Jim Devine wrote a review of vol. 2, and said, if I remember, that the value theory section should have been called "The Victory of Sraffa over Marx." That about says it. Moreover, Howard and King say nothing about the *current* value theory debate, perhaps because this debate was just beginning to unfold when vol. 2 was completed.
Unfortunately, there's little else, so I would recommend that you read H&K -- but critically and with the realization that it is already out of date.
If you want a quick -- but nonsystematic -- understanding of the Okishio theorem, its political/social significance, and the state of the debate today (also if you want my critique), I would (at the risk of being immodest) recommend my paper in _Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics_, edited by Alan Freeman and Guglielmo Carchedi. It's written such that you can skip the math and still understand it. It is just as partisan as H&K, but it doesn't ignore opposing views, as they do, and it tries to represent all views accurately.
Alan Freeman's chapter on "The Psychopathology of Walrasian Marxism" in M&NE is the easiest introduction to the current debate, but it isn't all that easy. But it's good.
"What does Okishio mean?"
It's an acronym: On Kapital, I Should Have Inconsistent Outcomes.
But humorously ... it's the last name of Nobuo Okishio, a Japanese Marxist economist now in his 70s. In 1961, he wrote a paper, almost unnoticed at the time, which argued that Marx's law of the tendential fall in the profit rate is false. Contrary to what Marx held, says Okishio, new productivity-increasing, mechanized, techniques of production adopted by profit-maximizing capitalists cannot themselves cause the profit rate to fall. In the 1970s, the paper became very famous and its result, which became known as the "Okishio theorem," was (and still is) nearly universally regarded as a "proof." It ain't so.
I can't give you a thumbnail sketch of the significance of this, but the following should be suggestive: on a few different occasions, Marx wrote that his law of the tendential fall in the profit rate is *the* most important law of modern political economy, and he puts forth a theory of economic crisis in vol. III of Capital based on it.
"What does OPE stand for?"
Outline of Political Economy. The idea of the listowner, Jerry Levy, was to form a list to develop an outline of all the unanswered questions in political economy. I'm not sure that many who joined the list thought this project was either worthwhile or practicable. I for one did not. What the list became was largely a debate over value theory, especially over whether Marx's own theory is internally inconsistent.
Ciao,
Andrew ("Drewk") Kliman Home: Dept. of Social Sciences 60 W. 76th St., #4E Pace University New York, NY 10023 Pleasantville, NY 10570 (914) 773-3951 Andrew_Kliman at msn.com
"... the *practice* of philosophy is itself *theoretical.* It is the *critique* that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." -- K.M.