Garegnani on Sraffa, Ricardo and Marx

I was going to write something about the Ricardian roots of Marx, but in all fairness a lot of ink has already been spilled on the subject. Here is the reply to the question about the relation between Sraffa and Marx, given by Garegnani in 1978 (here for the whole interview; subscription required):

"The conception which some people have of this relationship [Sraffa and Marx] seems to me quite misleading. And in order to reach a correct understanding of it, we first have to grasp the true relationship between Marx and Ricardo. I have argued elsewhere that this latter relationship should be seen in terms of a strict continuity at the level of economic analysis. Of course, unlike Ricardo and the classical economists, Marx sought to show that the capitalist mode of production is no more permanent than the modes which came before it. But this does not contradict my previous point, since it is perfectly normal that a given theoretical approach should reveal to one author a series of consequences that were not brought to light by his predecessors. That was precisely the relationship, for Marx, between his ‘critique of political economy’ (that is, his demonstration of the transitory character of capitalism) and the work of Ricardo. In fact, Marx deduces the transitory character of capitalism from a kernel of analyses whose object is what he often called ‘the inner nexus of bourgeois economic relations’—essentially, the antagonistic relationship between wages and profits. Now, as Marx himself repeatedly stated, this ‘inner nexus’ was discovered by the classical economists, and analysed especially in Ricardo’s theory of surplus-value and profits. It was precisely this theory which he took up and developed in his ‘critique’. Once this continuity between the classical economists and Marx has been understood, it is easy to grasp the true relationship between Sraffa and Marx. For a revival of the classical approach is possible only if it starts from the highest point of development attained in the past—that is to say, the point at which we find it in Marx’s work."

This is why in the forthcoming documentary on Capitalism, written and directed by documentary filmmaker Ilan Ziv and organized around key historical debates and thinkers, I argued that Marx should be, contra-Samuleson, be seen as a major Ricardian.

On Sraffa and the labor theory of value this is what Garegnani had to say:

"This brings us back to the second of the three aspects of Sraffa’s work: namely, his proposed solution to the problem of value based on more general hypotheses than those which assert that commodities exchange in accordance with the labour embodied in them. Solving this problem and abandoning the labour theory of value are, in reality, two sides of the same coin: any living theoretical approach has to develop, undergoing modification and modifying its own propositions. Now, it is indeed sometimes said that Sraffa has thrown Marx’s economic theory into crisis. But in order to understand this point of view, we must recall the significance attached to the labour theory of value by that Marxist tradition which arose at the end of the nineteenth century, following the marginalist attack on Marx. I have argued elsewhere that the positions developed at that time were of an essentially defensive character; and that they reflected a temporary state of theoretical weakness which is now, largely thanks to Sraffa, in the process of being overcome.

This being said, however, it is important to remember that Sraffa created only the premises for a revival of the classical and Marxist theoretical approach. He did this by clarifying anew the basic elements of that approach, and by providing a solution to the problems of value-theory that had remained unanswered. It would thus be a mistake to seek in Production of Commodities what is not actually there: to seek, that is, a theory of capital accumulation and crises, or even a theory of the way in which relations between the two social classes determine the division of the product between wages and profits. I would maintain that, so far as all these problems are concerned, Sraffa refers us to the place where they receive the most advanced treatment in the framework of this theoretical approach—essentially to Marx’s Capital, and to all the work which has to be done in order to develop Marx’s ideas in conformity with the present state of reality and economic knowledge."

Note that Sraffa suggested that his solution, based on the standard commodity, could be interpreted as akin to Smith's labor commanded theory of value, and as such could (and I would say should) be seen as a logically coherent version of the labor theory of value (discussed in this previous post).

PS: As I was writing this I saw that Robert Vienneau has just posted on the same topic here.