> I'm not going to develop the arguments on this ,
> but the perspective advanced here denies that
> there is a transformation problem because Marx's
> value theory, unlike Ricardo's value theory, isNOT
> INTENDED TO EXPLAIN PRICES!
I don't know about "Marx's value theory" -- because I don't want to argue about which are the correct conceptual boundaries for "Marxist theory of value" and which are not. But I can say with absolute confidence that, as a thinker, as a critic of political economy, Marx was *deeply* interested in understanding prices and their changes.
If we want to seriously figure out what Marx's contribution to our struggle today is, then we have to try to take Marx's work in its entirety. I believe Engels was exactly right in stating summarily that Marx was above all a revolutionary. With all due respect, Marx was a "toolbox." And, appropriately for his goal of turning things around so radically, his curiosity had an universal scope. His favorite slogan was "nothing human is alien to me" (nothing like "I don't care about what explains prices").
Marx was most concerned with advancing the workers' struggle, although of course not necessarily in the most immediate sense. Therefore, we have to evaluate Marx's intellectual output in the context of his goal of subverting the status quo. Marx's theoretical questions were aimed at enriching the intellectual stock of working people in their struggle for freedom.
Most of us here will agree that capitalist societies are societies in which most of the wealth appears in the form of *commodities*. Commodities have *prices*, which express values. The abstraction of value wasn't an end in itself. It was an abstraction intended as a means to understanding the concrete totality of *price* phenomena. Understanding prices is *sine qua non* to any understanding of the existing conditions in their concrete totality. Therefore, it is odd to say that Marx was not interested in price dynamics. He had to be *or* he wasn't really interested in how capitalist societies function.
Some prices (e.g. wages, the interest rate, stock prices, etc.) and the overall average of commodity prices (the "price level" and its percentage change, the "inflation rate") are so crucial to any understanding of how capitalist societies actually function that if Marx had no interest in them, then he was simply missing the boat. But he wasn't...
People interested in actual documentary evidence of my claim can browse for themselves the marxists.org archives or do a google search on the archives for the word "price."
I should add that the questions posed by classical political economists were, for the most part, in Marx's judgement, pointing at core aspects of the functioning of capitalist societies. Smith and Ricardo, in particular, were serious and intelligent thinkers. (Marx, of course, had no patience with the vulgar economists, who were uninterested in uncovering the deeper causes of social phenomena, but that's a different issue.) Marx did not necessarily import their answers, but he did take the questions of the classical political economists very seriously. The question of what explains the movement of prices was paramount to the classical economists and also to Marx's critique of political economy.
But even if Marx was only interested in theorizing for its own sake, without any apparent connection to any practical concern, the relevant question for us is: "How does what Marx found in his time and circumstance relate to our needs and issues, here and now?"
In addition: Should we be interested in price dynamics? Does our struggle benefit from a sharper understanding of price dynamics?