Aim of this paper is the rejection of the neoricardian criticism of irrelevance against the labour theory of value. To this end in the first part (section 2 - 4) the paper presents a rigorous solution of the transformation problem. However that solution appears still insufficient to dispose of the criticism. In the next two sections the paper seeks for the reason of this insufficiency. The step that is needed to defeat actually criticism is detected in lightning the relation between living labour expended during the working day and production methods. The paper finishes with a consideration on the reasons of the strength of criticism and with some observations related to the achieved result, among other things the possibility to reach an unantagonistic relation between Marx and Sraffa.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE sponsored by Department of Economics Faculty of Economics University of Bergamo THE OTHER SRAFFA. SURPRISES IN THE ARCHIVE? December 21-22, 2010 aula 3, via Salvecchio 19 University of Bergamo - Bergamo Alta, Italy