Abstract
In the Notes titled ‘Winter 1927–28’, Sraffa begins to work out his ‘equations’. It was quite easy for him to see that in a subsistence economy or the economy with ‘no surplus’, the relative prices of commodities could be directly determined by the given physical input–output data:
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Notes
- 1.
Frank Ramsey was a brilliant mathematician-philosopher and a close friend of both Sraffa and Wittgenstein. He unfortunately died at the very young age of 26 in 1930.
- 2.
Kurz (20122012) argues that Sraffa’s equations are like chemical equations such as 2H2O = 2H2 + O2. In this case the equation can be interpreted either as an arrow (→), representing chemical reaction, or as an equation (=), representing the balancing of the number of elements of each type on both sides of the equation. As Kurz puts it: ‘the mass of two molecules of water is equal to the mass of the two molecules of hydrogen plus the mass of one molecule of oxygen’ (p. 1548). The problem with this analogy, however, is that in the case of chemical equations the so-called ‘mass of hydrogen and oxygen’ are known and not determined by the equation. However, in Sraffa’s equations the counterpart of the ‘mass of hydrogen and oxygen’, that is, the values of a, b and c are unknowns and the ‘solution’ of the system of equations is supposed to determine those values. In this case the equations cannot be interpreted in terms of arrows, as ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ appear both as inputs and outputs in the system.
- 3.
An impact of this could be seen in his final lecture notes of 1928–31. Here Sraffa argues:
‘I should like to notice that between these two notions of real cost {i.e., objective & subjective} it is not much a question of one of them being right and the other wrong, as of one being relevant for dealing with one set of questions, and other for an entirely different sort of questions. I think that the classical notion of costs, as quantities of things used up in production, is the most important from the point of view of the theory of value; in the determination of the price of a pair of boots I think that the amount of leather and of labour time employed in its production have much more to do than the inner feelings of the shoemaker and whether he enjoys his work or finds it unpleasant. But of course in such questions as that of measuring that (chiefly interest Marshall, such as) that of measuring maximum satisfaction, and finding means of increasing it, these objective quantities becomes {sic} irrelevant, and the amount of sacrifice has only to be taken into account’. (D2/4: 24–25)
Contrast this to the ‘Summer 1927’ draft in which the distinction between the classical and the modern theories of value is drawn on the ground that the classists were interested in questions of growth and distribution and not in what determines the relative prices of commodities, as the modern economists are. The rest of the lectures of 1928–31, however, do not have anything significantly different from the 1925, 1926 articles and the ‘Summer 1927’ notes.
- 4.
This sentiment is echoed much later by Schrodinger in the context of physics in Science and Humanism—a book that Sraffa read closely in 1943—‘But when you come to the ultimate particles constituting matter, there seems to be no point in thinking of them again as consisting of some material. They are, as it were, pure shape, nothing but shape; what turns up again and again in successive observations is this shape, not an individual speck of material’ (Schrodinger, E. 1952, 2nd ed., p. 21; original emphasis).
- 5.
See von Wright (1974) for details on the notion of causation in a functional relation.
- 6.
Sraffa came to know Gramsci in 1919 and they quickly formed a close friendship that lasted till Gramsci’s death in 1937. During the early years of 1919–20 Sraffa, under the leadership of Gramsci and his other socialist collaborators, was actively involved in the publication of the socialist journal, L’Ordine Nuovo. Sraffa was also highly instrumental in keeping Gramsci’s intellectual interest alive during his time in prison and life under Fascist police surveillance from 1926 to his death in 1937 by opening an account at the Sperling e Kupfer bookstore in Milan for Gramsci to order any books he wanted, and also directly sending him interesting books from time to time. He was also instrumental in preserving Gramsci’s ‘Prison Notebooks’. (See Naldi (2000) for more details on Sraffa’s relationship with Gramsci and the top leadership of the Italian Communist Party.)
- 7.
I am thankful to Nerio Naldi for providing me with this letter and, in his own characteristic humble words, ‘a very approximate translation’ of the original from Italian. Sraffa’s letters to Tatiana Schucht are kept in Rome in the archives of Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, in ‘Carte Tatiana Schucht, Corrispondenza’; this letter has also been published in P. Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci, edited by V. Gerratana, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1991, pp.21–4. The original in Italian is: ‘Nino riceverà, spero tra non molto un libro che certo lo interesserà intitolato “Science at the crossroads”. Forse lo invoglierà a leggere degli altri libri di argomento scientifico. È un fatto curioso come nella cultura di tutti gli Italiani che hanno una cultura vi sia un gran buco: l’ignoranza delle scienze naturali. Croce è un caso estremo, ma tipico. I filosofi credono che, quando han provato che gli scienziati sarebbero degni di esser vergognosamente bocciati in filosofia, il loro compito sia finito. E così le scienze naturali sono rimaste affidate alle cure dei positivisti, con gli effetti ben noti. In questi tempi alcuni scienziati, almeno in Inghilterra, sembrano aver lasciato il positivismo per darsi ad una specie di grossolano misticismo. Il De Ruggiero ha dato conto di alcune di queste tendenze in una serie di articoli nella Critica: ma questi articoli sono, per quel che riguarda i fisici, assai male informati e tendenziosi e mancano di ogni senso di proporzione. Potreste chiedere a Nino se desidera informarsi di prima mano, e ricevere un certo numero di libri: forse vorrebbe rifarsi ab ovo, e ricevere anche dei vecchi scrittori scientifici.’
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Sinha, A. (2016). A New Beginning. In: A Revolution in Economic Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30616-2_3
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