The political economy of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: a comment on Pasinetti and Sraffa

Abstract

Luigi Pasinetti's contribution in this Special Issue highlights the complexity and richness of Sraffa's sources and points to the diversity of the streams of thought that may be detected behind Sraffa's original research programme. In particular, Pasinetti calls attention to the heuristic value of Sraffa's unpublished manuscripts in assessing the constructive effort of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (PCC). This paper moves further along the above line of investigation and explores the Smithian strand of PCC. In particular the paper highlights that the duality between 'horizontal' and 'vertical' prices, explored by both Sraffa and Pasinetti, points to the existence of different complementary causal linkages in classical political economy. Vertical integration makes it possible to 'resolve' prices into a sum of weighted quantities of labour and calls attention to the system of weights needed for this operation. Alternative weighting systems may be associated with alternative institutional arrangements. For example, a traditional wage–profit economy would attach increasingly higher weights to increasingly remote quantities of labour. But the analytics of vertical integration also raises the institutional possibility of increasingly lower weights as increasingly remote labour quantities are considered. The paper argues that by assessing together the horizontal (Ricardian) and vertical (Smithian) strands of PCC it is possible to grasp more fully the theoretical potential of this work. In particular, it becomes possible to distinguish between the identification of general causal principles and the instantiation of those principles in specific historical contexts. Copyright , Oxford University Press.