New Left Review has surely made a major contribution to the development of Marxism by publishing a thought-provoking interview with Lucio Colletti, and an important article by Bob Rowthorn, which both appeared in nlr 86 July /August 1974. These two texts together cover a variety of important issues. This letter is only concerned with the area on which both of the two articles overlap; i.e. the question of the relation between Marxian political economy and the works of Sraffa and his followers. Although I am far from hostile to the main lines of arguments made by both Colletti and Rowthorn in this area, I feel that there is some scope for misinterpretation and the derivation of mistaken conclusions from what they argue.
The first point I wish to comment upon is the assertion, and it is no more than a mere assertion, that Colletti makes when he says that Sraffa’s ideas are incompatible ‘with the entire foundation of Marx’s analysis’ (pp. 21–22). Whatever the truth of this assertion, and whatever the truth of Colletti’s criticisms of Baran, Dobb, and Sweezy, Colletti must be criticised for making it without any explanation. It is far from clear that such a deep incompatibility exists. As the assertion stands it is likely to provide another weak excuse for some Marxists to dogmatically throw overboard the entire edifice of Sraffa’s work. At the moment Marxism is cautiously entering a period of renewed theoretical development, of escaping from its isolation and learning from the healthy and scientific aspects of other schools of social science. Although Marxism is a distinct theoretical system from Classical economics this does not mean that Marx did not learn from Classical economists such as Ricardo or Smith. In fact he adopted some of their categories and propositions, such as, for example, the distinction between exchange value and use value. The latter was utilized and endowed with a distinctive importance in Marx’s works.
On the question of the Sraffa school it is necessary to draw a distinction between the formal propositions of Sraffa, Garegnani, and others, and the theoretical interpretation of these results by Neo-Ricardian writers. Rowthorn provides an excellent critique of the Neo-Ricardian school in his essay, which I entirely accept, but this should not be taken as an attack on Sraffa’s formal results. In fact Rowthorn nowhere makes such an attack in his essay, he explicitly recognizes the importance of the formal Sraffian results (p. 73), and in other works footnote1 he has accepted a solution to the transformation problem on the same lines as Bortkiewicz and Sraffa.