Dal materialismo storico alla teoria macroeconomica del valore. Karl Marx e il percorso di ricerca di Piero Sraffa

The interpretation of the relationship between Marx's ‘critique of political economy’ and Sraffa’s ‘prelude to a critique of economic theory’ is still an open question. However, the reading of the Sraffa archive notes has helped to shed new light on this issue, to make its interpretation less unilateral and more articulate, and to investigate the question of Marx's inheritance in Sraffa's theory. This paper deals with two fundamental issues: historical materialism and the value theory. In pursuing this aim, Sraffa's thought is compared with that of two important contributions, which indeed refer to Marx's theory. As for historical materialism, we will refer to Gramsci. Sraffa shares with Gramsci a non-mechanistic interpretation of historical materialism and is aware of the social-historical dimension of the economic categories, even those that on the surface have a purely analytical and abstract content. The same concept of surplus, and, even more so, the laws of income distribution appear to be non-universal, but historically determined, concepts related to a particular mode of production. As for the theory of value, we will refer to the "New Interpretation" of Foley, Duménil and Lipietz, where value has a macro dimension and refers to aggregate quantities (national income or value added and surplus value). It is evident that Sraffa has constantly reflected on Marx's value theory. The problem is how much of this reflection is at the base of his analysis developed in Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. There are sound reasons to believe that, according to Sraffa, Marx's value theory was not only a strictly analytical tool related to price determination, but had a more general dimension concerning the possibility of defining the rate of surplus value, in order to develop the analysis of the production social relations in a capitalist market economy. The choice of the units of measure of labor and prices and the construction of the standard system in Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and some Sraffa’s notes written after the publication of his book, corroborate the interpretation of an important macro-dimension of value in his theory.