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148 Piero SraffaObviously the ‘Marx’ thus re-proposed is a specific Marx: not necessarilya travesty, as many orthodox Marxists maintained (cf. for instanceMedio 1972), but certainly a Marx in which some elements are placedin the forefront, while others – though undoubtedly present in his writings,such as dialectical materialism – are played down. As a matter offact, Sraffa’s analytical contribution could not leave untouched Marx’s‘vision’ (in the broader sense of the term).For example, the use of Sraffian analytical tools shows that theMarxian ‘law of the falling rate of profit’ is devoid of general validity. 23Furthermore, as we saw earlier in § 5.5, the standard commodity doesnot constitute an analytical tool capable of connecting the world oflabour values to the world of production prices. Most notably, the widelydebated problem of the ‘transformation of labour values into productionprices’ is substantially solved, in the light of Sraffa’s analytical results, byconcluding that the results reached in terms of labour values are generallynot confirmed by analysis in terms of production prices. 24There have been lengthy discussions on the precise extent to whichthis ‘renewed Marx’ (‘Marx after Sraffa’, following the happy title ofSteedman’s 1977 iconoclastic book) corresponds to the original Marx. 25At one extreme some, such as Colletti (1968: 431), maintain that ‘Sraffamade a bonfire of Marx’s analysis’. Among the various forms which thisthesis took, a central element seems to be the idea that discarding dialecticalmaterialism means leaving aside such a central aspect of Marx’sthought as commodity fetishism.By contrast, some economists, notably Garegnani (1981, 1984), maintainthat the differences between Sraffa’s and Marx’s analyses are notsubstantial. We are confronted with the development of the same paradigm,as Marx retains the analytical structure of classical economists,centred on the notion of surplus, which is then taken up by Sraffa withgreater analytical rigour. In fact, a ‘return to Marx’ is considered to beprecisely the road which Sraffa has in mind for the reconstruction ofpolitical economy.Marx’s exploitation is considered as a matter of fact, since the surplusgenerated in the productive process is at least partly appropriated, as23Cf. Steedman (1977a, Chapter 9); the problem is discussed in various paperscollected in Screpanti and Zenezini (1978).24Cf. in particular Steedman (1977a); for a history of the ‘transformationproblem’, cf. for instance Vicarelli (1975).25For a bibliography of this debate, cf. Roncaglia (1975: 161–6). Let us recall inparticular Lippi’s book, 1979, and more recently the wide collection of essaysedited by Caravale (1991).The Sraffa Legacy 149profits and rents, by social classes other than the workers. Besides, theantagonistic relation between wages and profits – expressing on theground of income distribution the class conflict opposing capitalistsand workers – is highlighted with exceptional clarity by means of ananalytical tool developed by Sraffa, namely the standard commodity.Indeed, when the standard commodity is used as numeraire for measuringthe wage rate, we get a negative linear relationship between thewage rate and the rate of profits. These foundations are considered assufficient for retention of the central aspects of Marx’s thought: ‘thecontingent nature of capitalism is demonstrated by Marx on the basisof an analytical nucleus consisting in what he often calls “the internalnexus of bourgeois economic relations”, that is, basically, the antagonisticrelation between wages and profits’ (Garegnani 1981: 112).The analytical core common to the classical economists, to Marxand Sraffa, is located by Garegnani 26 in the set of relations connectingproduction prices and distributive variables analysed in Sraffa (1960).More precisely:surplus theories have […] a core which is isolated from the rest ofthe analysis because the wage, the social product and the technicalconditions of production appear there as already determined. It is inthis ‘core’ that we find the determination of the shares other thanwages as a residual: a determination which […] will also entail thedetermination of the relative values of commodities. Further, as anatural extension of this, we shall find in the ‘core’ an analysis of therelations between, on the one hand, the real wage, the social productand the technical conditions of production (the independent variables)and, on the other hand, the shares other than wages constituting thesurplus, and the relative prices (the dependent variables).(Garegnani 1984: 296)Two notes of caution are to be stressed. First, side by side with the relationsconsidered internal to the core, these variables (both dependentand independent) can also be connected by other relations, which ‘wereleft to be studied outside the “core”’ (Garegnani 1984: 297). Secondly,the notion of a core of the surplus theories remains substantiallyunchanged when the profit rate replaces the wage as the independentdistributive variable exogenously determined, that is, outside the core(Garegnani 1984: 321–2).26Cf. the essays collected in Garegnani (1981, 1984, 1990).