On Sraffa and Marx: a Comment

Abstract

In his discussion of interpretations of Sraffa’s thought published in the Special Issue of this journal on ‘New Perspectives on the Work of Piero Sraffa’ (November 2012), Heinz Kurz criticises some of our contributions to the literature on Sraffa. However, none of the contributions he refers to was published in the context of this Special Issue, but several years earlier. In view of what appears to us to be a serious misrepresentation of Sraffa’s (and to some extent Garegnani’s) positions by Kurz—in particular Sraffa’s relationship with Marx—we will try to elucidate some points. In a paper, presented in December 1998 at a conference convened in Rome by the Istituto Gramsci to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Sraffa’s birth, de Vivo (1998) provided a reconstruction of the route followed by Sraffa to arrive at the main results of his Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Sraffa, 1960). This reconstruction of Sraffa’s path was of course considered provisional and the expectation was that others would offer different interpretations of this path (as distinct from the reconstruction of particular aspects of Sraffa’s work). No such alternative interpretation materialised then and, surprisingly, none seems to have been provided to this day. The interpretation suggested in 1998 was completed in another paper presented at a conference on Sraffa held in Rome at the Accademia dei Lincei in February 2003. Later that year, a paper drawing the two contributions together was published (de Vivo, 2003). This gave a fuller interpretation of Sraffa’s path.