![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This comment focuses on the assertion by Gehrke and Kurz (2018) that the origin of the equations which formed the backbone of Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is not related in any way to Marx, and particularly Marx’s reproduction schemes, as argued by the late Giorgio Gilibert and myself. This comment argues that the 2018 article by Gehrke and Kurz makes significant—but unacknowledged—retreats from positions previously presented by the authors, and that the relevance of Marx and his reproduction schemes for the origin of Sraffa’s (1960) work for Production of Commodities is beyond reasonable doubt.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Nerio Naldi for very useful comments, and for pointing out some errors in a previous version of this note.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Reference to Sraffa’s papers is as SP, followed by the call mark they have in Trinity College’s list (now online at trin.cam.ac.uk/Piero_Sraffa).
2 In 2012 Kurz advanced another fanciful notion, which is not included in the GK 2018 article, viz. that
there is reason to think that Sraffa wrote his … “first equations” as chemists do since Lavoisier, who in the late eighteenth century presented chemical reactions first as a balance sheet and then as an algebraic equation, with the name of a substance expressing the equality of constituents and compound, e.g. “2H2 O = 2H2 + O2”. (Kurz Citation2012, p. 1547)
3 Here we also have what appears to be a small but significant retreat: Kurz previously maintained that only in the 1940s’, ‘all of a sudden’, Marx became relevant to Sraffa (Kurz Citation2012, p. 1541, italics added).
4 Nerio Naldi (arguing in favour of a different interpretation of the origin of Sraffa’s equation, actually nearer to Garegnani’s) concurs that the document we refer to in the text
did not reflect a development directly stemming from the prelectures and were not meant to serve as a starting point to pursue a reduction of production processes to quantities of an absolutely necessary commodity directly and indirectly employed in those very processes. (Naldi Citation2018, p. 140)
5 We note that in Theorien über den Mehrwert the idea of a cost composed of material things is attributed by Marx to the Physiocrats: ‘value … to them … consists of material things’ (‘Chez eux, la valeur … se compose de matière’: French edition, I, 44).
6 This folder contains 24 documents, all dealing with ‘Physical real costs’. (These 24 documents are SP D3/12/42/33-56 in the Trinity list of Sraffa’s papers, and G.S.B.1.14.9.1-24 according to Garegnani’s inventory.) GK (Citation2018, p. 430) appear to date this set of papers to 1927 because their article has a footnote containing a quotation (with no apparent purpose) of the passage to which I draw attention, misleadingly stating that it is ‘undated’: it is certainly datable to 1927, and in all likelihood to be datable to the very summer when Sraffa wrote the ‘Pre-lectures’.
7 Garegnani writes: ‘The manuscript [with the equations] takes up the idea of the “necessary commodity” measuring costs’ (Citation2003, p. 465, emphasis added), but it must be stressed again that no mention of a necessary commodity—let alone of a reduction to it—is to be found in the document.
8 SP D3/12/6/1/1.
9 SP D3/12/6/4.
10 As is well known, Marx’s Theorien über den Mehrwert (Theories of Surplus Value, the so-called volume IV of Capital) was edited for publication by Kautsky in 1905–10, not strictly following the original Mss, and interpolating the sections on the Physiocrats with parts of vol. II of Capital. The French edition (1924–26), which Sraffa used, followed Kautsky’s edition. To the best of my knowledge no (complete) English translation of Kautsky’s edition has been published.
11 The passage can be found in both Capital, vol. II (Kerr edition, p. 414) and in the French edition of Theories of Surplus Value (vol. I, p. 108):
Le Tableau Economique de Quesnay montre à grands traits comment un produit annuel de la production nationale, déterminé quant à la valeur, se répartit dans la circulation de telle façon que, toute circonstances égales d’ailleurs, il peut y avoir reproduction simple, c’est-à-dire reproduction à la même echelle.
12 Sraffa consistently refers to its French edition which had just been published.