>Actually, that's not quite right, he quotes Smith, Ricardo, and Franklin among others in support of LTV so it's my conjecture that he in fact did see an incons

>Actually, that's not quite right, he quotes Smith, Ricardo, and Franklin among others in support of LTV so it's my conjecture that he in fact did see an inconsistency and run with the theory anyway. Of course, but his quotation is both praising and damning; he believed that he resolved the issue with the dual character of labour power, a qualitatively special commodity, to preserve the integrity of the theory, which previously failed to explain the origin of profits in a capitalist economy. He takes his critique of political economy from the rare gems of insight developed previously (by Smith and Ricardo). His criticism was that the theory as developed in classical political economy is inconsistent, but not inconsistent in the dimension you earlier pointed out - that prices do not match up to labour values. He took that part for granted. Smith's work has holes, at least according to Marx, but the insight he developed, labour being the substance of value (more precisely, exchange value) was crucial to Marx's development of the theory. My point is that the theories can't be lumped together, since Marx presents such a radical break from Ricardo (and thereby Smith).