Maybe Michael Perelman knows them better from his engagement with them over the years on pen-l; maybe Gary Mongiovi has enjoyed dinner with them.
I'm not in a position to comment about their motivations or personalities.
But honestly it's not clear to me that you are not better served reading my short description of the temporal single system that I mailed to this list than wading through the wikipedia which I have not done.
Also what I have been trying to underline is that capitalism creates contradictory tendencies.
On the one hand, rising labor productivity and the resultant competition keeps prices anchored to values, and a society in which social labor relations are mediated by commodities cannot interfere to a great extent with the apparently spontaneous formation of prices without jeopardizing its ability to maintain the quantitative and qualitative allocation of aggregate social labor time needed to maintain the division of labor through which society is reproduced.
On the other hand, capitalists are moving liquid money capital towards the highest profit rate, the collective result of which is a tendency towards the equalization of the profit rate calculated in regards to the total capital invested. This can be shown to be in contradiction to the law of value. For example, a firm that is capital intensive would apparently be in a position to appropriate less unpaid labor time than a labor intensive one, yet there is a tendency for them to enjoy the same return on their total capital invested.
The response to this contradiction has generally been to concede that profit cannot only be a form of surplus value, and must have sources other than unpaid labor time. The theory of exploitation focused on the actual appropriation of unpaid labor time proves untenable.
But Marx thought that the latter tendency would lead to a modification, not negation of the law of value, in part because there remained overwhelmingly powerful competitive forces pushing prices towards value; the latter tendency may indeed lead to some redistribution of surplus value, which resulted in some deviation of prices from value but would not interfere with prices moving with values as labor productivity advanced.
This bit of theory has been considered scandalously illogical. I fail to see the problem here, but I would love for someone to explain to the soundness of the scholarly consensus. Marx seems quite reasonable to me. And even the politics of it don't make sense to me as it's quite possible to concede the power of the Marxian law of value and side with the globalization of capitalism as a necessary development of the global productive forces (see Meghnad Desai).
But I don't think you're going to have good luck as a Marxist economist if you don't think there is a contradiction between value and profit, between the first and third volume of Capital, so ingrained has become the charge of illogic and contradiction. Pick up almost any history of economic thought.
And if you are a Marxist economist who somehow has a job in an economics dept, you probably need to do things like represent Marx in an agent computational model, recast national income data in terms of value ratios, vindicate the LTV econometrically, and speak to what neo classical economics are or were at some point themselves interested in (the Cambridge Capital controversy). And even that is not likely to secure you employment. It's tough; economics depts must be the toughest place for Marxists even if (or especially if) you are a labor economist.
And I understand the sense that as Sraffa's critique represents a critique of neoclassical economics that seems to meet high standards of logical rigor and mathematical surprise--indeed even Samuelson was forced to admit defeat around the reswitching controversy--the Sraffian comparative static method of technical conditions must be accepted in all implications, viz. its critique of Marx's labor theory of value (no need for value if prices can be calculated from technical conditions from which values would putatively have to be derived anyway, and value proves indeterminate or negative, and impossible to translate into prices of production) and falling rate of profit theory.
Giving those up is a small price to pay, these theorists argue, to destroy the apologetic marginal productivity theory of distribution on the basis of a logically consistent theory, i.e. a theory which does not have a transformation problem.
If that's the underlying point, I feel the force of it. Even Ronald Meek who wrote a famous history of the labor theory of value conceded here in the preface to the reissue of that history.
So any attempt to defend Marx who putatively suffers from a fatal transformation problem against the comparative static, technical conditions approach is met with harsh and sometimes (I believe) illogical criticism. Defending Marx only stands in the way of the rational rehabilitation of a materialist theory in which the existence of a surplus is recognized.
But as an example of illogical criticism. there is the response to Kliman and Freeman's critique of Okishio's impossibility theorem which in effects counsels accounting fraud, viz. disappearing the initial sum of money capital in the accounts. No accounting either from the perspective of shareholders or creditors would allow for that. Not cash based accounting, not accrual accounting. It's just unsound. And again I don't know of a good response to Kliman on this point.
There is just too much at stake--the very possibility of rational critical dialogue with colleagues who are not going to return to the labor theory of value (or entertain a theory of law governed catastrophe and breakdown) under any conditions.
Perhaps for the sake of this list we should speak to the non economists' critique of the labor theory of value, for example Negri's very interesting one in Multitude. That labor values are not measurable at this point, for example. Maybe we should talk about Deleuze and the interesting criticisms by Peter Hallward. Eric has made Deleuze sound like Schumpeter: rather than creative destruction, we have re-axiomatizing deterritorialized flows. Schumpeter is a bit catchier, I think.
At any rate, as far as neo classical economics, it does not seem to me though that one has to go much beyond Veblen's old charge of circularity against Clark.
That that critqiue was not decisive only speaks to the power of ideology, not the strength of neo classical exchange economics.
Plus, why get trapped in the realm of distribution and in an essentially static framework?
Distribution is basically settled by production relations; the economy is dynamic and exchange is a fascade in terms of the wage relation.
Rakesh
ps Sumit Sarkar's history of modern India is quite good.