> It was well-understood the context in which Marx wrote, and everyone understood Marx in connection with that context.

Not really. Hilferding's reply to Bohm-Bawerk so early on showed that many of Marx's critics still misunderstood him, and Marxist economists have dealt with those criticisms time and time again, not only philosophical misunderstandings but on the transformation problem too. The most outrageous is the charge of inconsistency between Vol. 1 and Vol. 3 - luckily Marx isn't charged with such inconsistency any more (only the failure to transform values to prices in the specific context of competing capitals) but Kliman is partly responsible for that turn. Bohm-Bawerk's objections to Marx's value theory gain new life in fancy terminology (such as "Generalized Commodity Exploitation Theorem"). The degenerative research program actually seems to be in the responses of philosophers and economists to Marx[0].

>Kliman now pretends that everyone between Marx' time and now read Marx wrong, and only he, Kliman, has uncovered the key to decode Marx.

The idea of the TSSI was about before Kliman, and it'll be about after him; the point I was making is that he was the first one to be loud enough about it to attract attention. Kliman at least attempts to make a convincing case based on textual exegesis of Marx's works that shows misinterpretation, which is not unreasonable in a world dominated by equilibrium economics and thereby equilibrium responses to Marx. His only contention is that Marxian economists had surrendered too much ground. Further, in several places his claim is not that Marx is correct, only that the charge of inconsistency is misplaced.

>that the response to more serious scholars (even serious Marxist economists) is repulsion.

That's not true; the TSSI is as popular as it is criticized. For every explicitly anti-TSSI scholar I can probably name a pro-TSSI one. I'm sure you'd agree that Marxists tend to like orthodoxy and established traditions just as much as anyone else, which shows in the responses (by Marxian economists) to the TSSI and also to Okishio's theorem. There are plenty of good mathematical and philosophical objections to the TSSI on Marxist grounds, but very few claim it is as philosophically bankrupt and divorced from reality as you seem to make it out to be. Veneziani and Mohun's objections are mathematical, not "practical". The charge of a vacuous theory divorced from understanding the dynamics of capitalism usually falls on the New Interpretation rather than the TSSI.

>As someone once pointed out, it is philosophers who interpret the world. The point is to change it.

I agree! As it happens, so do Kliman's co-authors. From Alan Freeman:

>I conclude that it is a legitimate political and research project to attempt to understand capitalism on the basis of the Marx’s own work. The persistent denial of its validity, on the false grounds that Marx’s theory has been proven incoherent, should be resisted by the political movement. Whatever the personal motivations of individuals that subscribe to this view, its actual effect is to deny access to Marx’s own economic views. To persist in promoting it now, above all, as is usually done, as an incontrovertible truth, must be treated as an unscientific act of censorship. Before beginning I want to lay before the audience the exact nature of the debate. First, it is not a scholastic debate. An audience of trade unionists, political activists, and professional intellectuals represents a genuine encounter, in Gramsci’s words, between those who think because they suffer and those who suffer because they think. It is a debate whose purpose is to change the world.

[0] http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Marxism/Marxism%20As%20Science.p...