In order to find a work of economic theory as ‘abstract’ as Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by means of Commodities, we have to go back to the very foundation of the science: to François Quesnay’s Tableau économique (1758). However, this abstraction is the result of a protracted conceptual labour, guided by a clear political purpose and concerned with understanding the present, historically determinate state of reality. It is thus necessary to consider Sraffa’s theoretical and political development during his essential formative period.
From 1919 to 1930; from the end of the First World War to the rise and consolidation of fascism; from Turin and Milan to London, Cambridge and Moscow; in his friendship with Gramsci and during the years of the latter’s imprisonment; in his meeting and intellectual collaboration with Keynes—this is where Sraffa’s theoretical programme took shape. The crisis of Italian society was inevitably at the heart of his analysis. But he immediately went on to examine capitalism as the ‘general’ form of organization of society; the function of the bourgeois class and of the demands raised by the workers’ movement through its political and trade-union expressions; the Soviet experience and the revolutionary perspectives which it opened in other countries. ‘Sraffa’s liberal-democratic intellectual formation’ (Gramsci) as a student of Einaudi encountered, on the one hand, Gramsci’s Marxism and critique of liberalism and, on the other, Keynes ‘New Liberalism’ and critique of communism. And Sraffa’s own thought fed on his lively relations with these thinkers. Thus, among the Gramscian themes to be found in Sraffa are an understanding of the ‘organic character’ of the crisis—in other words, its reality at once total and rooted in ‘the economic bases of the situation’; the need to distinguish between its permanent and fortuitous elements; and the related necessity of not reducing politics to economics. In a report from London, which appeared in l’Ordine Nuovo on 4 August 1921, Sraffa wrote: ‘The best will in the world cannot make up for the theoretical and practical absurdity of separating economic struggle from political struggle. Whenever the working-class bloc confronts the capitalist bloc, be it in connection with a quite ordinary wage dispute, the State cannot help intervening on the side of the latter. The struggle therefore becomes overtly political—a struggle for state power.’ Adopting for his research the standpoint of the workers’ movement, Sraffa investigates the development and mutation of capitalism in production and credit; recognizes the changed nature and function of the State; and studies fascism as a mode of politics whose purpose is to find new forms of social equilibrium and stability. He focuses all his attention on the links between the crisis of free market economy, the ‘opposing class interests’, and the social and political effects first of inflation and then of deflation.