Whew, as usual, Alan!
And as usual, I tend to agree with you, on both analysis and
the suggested method. Except that the concept of "collective"
you put forward gives me ominous memories of my first
Capital reading group, which was (as I suspect most are)
dominated by a group psyche that reading this volume was
likely to lead to The Truth--and therefore dissident views of
it were not appreciated (you can guess where I fell in that
picture).
My vision of collective activity is rather more what has
been happening in Post Keynesian economics over the last 20
years or so, where in general people have been "building the
elephant" by each working on their own area, but borrowing
the contributions of others from other areas. This is the
activity of a scientific community a la Kuhn--or rather,
a community practicing "Normal science". However, I think
in part the reason why this hasn't been the practice in
Marxian economics is that, from 1894 1/2 on, there hasn't
been "normal science" but rather a paradigm splitting--
both over an "anomaly" (the transformation problem) and
ideology.
The answer you first gave to your question 2 is therefore
very apt, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone (perhaps more
so). But given that we all do have our own "keys", I think
it best, as you suggest, to bring them out into the open.
Evidently I might be one of the first to be requested to
do so. Which is bad news, given my current workload (a
conference I'm organising for Feb. 12/13, writing 2 papers
for the conference, revising a paper for ROPE, starting a
new job teaching banking and finance [letters of sympathy
can be addressed to...]).
So I'm more than willing to wait until others have had
their say on Alan's "cards on the table" suggestion,
before I play my "lay down mazaire".
Cheers,
Steve Keen