The 'tiresome objector' and Old Moor: a renewal of the debate on Marx after Sraffa based on the unpublished material at the Wren Library

Abstract

The as yet unpublished Sraffa material may help to break the no-communication monologues between Marxists and Sraffa’s followers. This is possible only if we contest the vulgate that, after Sraffa, we have to accept a surplus approach which is mutilated from the labour theory of value. The connection between value and labour must be argued differently than in the old and new interpretations of Marx, according to the method of positing the presuppositions. To do this, some debates of the 1960s and 1970s are reviewed. Then, the shifting interpretations of Marx by Sraffa are considered, taking into account the (conflicting) views among Sraffian interpreters. Sraffa’s normalisations may be interpreted as implying that national income is nothing but a monetary exhibition of (the objectification of) living labour. This, together with Sraffa’s redefinition of the rate of surplus value at prices of production rather than at labour values, allows the building of a bridge with the new interpretation of Marx. The paper, however, stresses also some differences: between Sraffa and the new interpretation, and between the two and Marx. The labour theory of value is non-redundant in the inquiry about the constitution of the ‘givens’ in Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, because those ‘givens’ are traced back to a social relation of production. Moreover, the value of labour power is interpreted from a macroclass monetary perspective, akin to the circuitist and post-Keynesian approaches.