Piero Sraffa - Free

40 Piero SraffaActually, there was one particularly important weak point in the analyticrepresentation Ricardo offered of the classical conception of theeconomy, and that was the hypothesis of relative prices proportionalto the quantity of labour required for the production of the variouscommodities, which is inconsistent with the assumption of a uniformrate of profits in the various industries. For a coherent representationof the capitalist economy the problem had to be solved. Sraffa’s effortswere already moving in this direction when he began work on theRicardo edition, and the two lines of research were pursued in paralleland alternately for decades. Finally, in 1960, Sraffa published his littlejewel, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities.The next chapters are devoted to this work: a general presentationof it (Chapter 3), and a more detailed analysis of two aspects, thedistinction between basic and non-basic commodities (Chapter 4)and the construction of a unit of measure, the standard commodity(Chapter 5).3Production of Commoditiesby Means of Commodities3.1 From Ricardo to SraffaThis chapter is devoted to Sraffa’s major contribution: a relativelyslender volume – 92 pages of text, including the Preface – work onwhich began in 1927, when the author moved to Cambridge, and wasfinally published in 1960 in English, with the Italian edition followinga few weeks later. 1 As we shall see, in Production of Commodities by Meansof Commodities Sraffa comes up with a solution to the problem of valueframed in terms of the classical conception, simultaneously determiningrelative prices and one of the two distributive variables, the wagerate and the rate of profits, with the other distributive variable consideredas exogenously given.There is a close link between the critical edition of Ricardo’s Works andCorrespondence and the theoretical research Sraffa himself was engagedin. In the 1930s and 1940s his work proceeded along two parallel paths,with greater intensity on the Ricardo edition in the 1930s and withrenewed focus on the book in the early 1940s; 2 in the second half of1The Italian edition was prepared, as mentioned before, under the impulse andwith the decisive help of Sraffa’s life-long friend, the banker Raffaele Mattioli.The publisher, Giulio Einaudi, was also a friend of Sraffa’s and son of his professor,Luigi Einaudi; for years Sraffa was a highly respected adviser to his publisher,who played an important role in the shaping of Italy’s left-wing culture.2A multi-volume edition of the Sraffa Papers has been announced as forthcomingsince about a decade ago, under the general editorship of Heinz Kurz, withCambridge University Press. For a general presentation of the Sraffa Papers cf.Kurz (1998), Smith (1998, 2000); the catalogue prepared by Jonathan Smith isavailable on the Internet at http://www.lib.trin.cam.ac.uk. In the meantime,availability of the Sraffa papers held in Trinity College, Cambridge, stimulated, atan increasing rate over the past decade, researches on the original development(Continued)41