Confusions Concerning Sraffa (and Marx): Reply to Critics

The article that was the basis for the previous chapter became a target for criticism from a series of authors. Among the critics were Ian Steedman, the single most important spokesperson for the neo-Ricardian school after publishing his Marx After Sraffa in 1977, and John Eatwell, a world-renowned economist. The criticism made was different in the two cases: Steedman reminded us that Sraffa’s fixing of the distribution variables really gave primacy to another, fourth alternative. Eatwell, on the other hand, admitted that our argument was “trivially correct” but then it thereby condemned all theories, including that of Marx, based on the concept of surplus to inconsistency. In our reply, reproduced here, we showed that Steedman’s “fourth alternative” is no more immune to our criticism than the former three earlier criticised. As for Eatwell’s generalisation of our criticism to all surplus theories including Marx’s, we showed that Marx’s theory of the surplus (i.e. surplus-value under capitalism) is different from all others who use the concept of surplus in that the capitalist here first makes the worker produce the surplus before appropriating it, which gives a built-in immunity in Marx’s case against the kind of inconsistency that afflicts Sraffa’s economics.