Arun Bose: An Introduction to His Life and Work

This blog post introduces you to the economist Arun Bose (1919-2003) who made important contributions to Sraffian and Marxian literature. Bose was called a ‘Sraffian Marxist’ alongside Ronald Meek and Ian Steedman by Samir Amin in a 2015 article in the Monthly Review. Despite his substantial corpus of published writings, his work seems to have been largely forgotten within India. Therefore this essay provides an introduction to his life and work and ipso facto is a modest attempt at generating interest in Indian economic thought specifically (and more generally in the history of economic thought). In the past, blog posts which fall into this theme dealt with the economics of Krishna Bharadwaj and VKRV Rao. And what follows is a condensed version of Section II of my article ‘Arun Bose on Sraffa: Value Theory and Demand‘ published in Artha Vijnana as part of a 2018 special issue dedicated to the ‘Indian Reception of Piero Sraffa’s Economic Contributions’.”

Born in Calcutta, Bose had become interested in Marxian political economy by the end of high school. He completed his undergraduate studies (Tripos) at Cambridge University between 1937 and 1940. One of Bose’s recollections of Cambridge is the following: ‘During extra-curricular sessions, both Maurice Dobb and Piero Sraffa discussed economic theory and Marxian political economy, leaving an indelible impression on my mind’. Moreover, Bose was actively involved in student movements there and also joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the decade following this, Bose worked as a full-time activist in the Indian communist movement.’

Around 1957, Bose decided to resume his study of economic theory. Under the Commonwealth Universities Interchange scheme, he spent a year at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1960-1. Subsequently, he was asked to join the newly founded Kirori Mal College in Delhi at the behest of the economist B. N. Ganguli and the English professor Sarup Singh. B. N. Ganguli is the author of Indian Economic Thought: Nineteenth Century Perspectives (1977), one of the handful of books dedicated to Indian economic thought. In memoriam, the Economics Department at Kirori Mal has organised public lectures under the auspices of Arun Bose Memorial Lectures.’

Between 1963 and 1965, Bose closely engaged with Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960). Bose published a comment in Economic Weekly (now Economic & Political Weekly) in response to Krishna Bharadwaj’s review of Sraffa’s book entitled ‘Value through Exogenous Distribution’. Bose also published responses to the reviews of Sraffa’s book by Roy Harrod and David Collard respectively in the Economic Journal, one of the main international vehicles for the dissemination of economic ideas. And in 1965, he published an article on Sraffa’s book in the Economic Journal. And during this period, they corresponded; Bose sent Sraffa five letters to which he received responses to all but one (more details about the correspondence is available at the online archives of Trinity College).’

Bose’s next publication was after six years: an essay on Marx in the 1971 volume of the History of Political Economy; it continues to be an important journal devoted to the history of economic thought. Next year, he published another essay on Marx in Science & Society. After another brief hiatus from publication, he published a book in 1975 titled Marxian and Post-Marxian Political Economy; he gave a series of lectures at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta with the same title. Bose acknowledges Sukhamoy Chakravarty for reading the book draft and for familiarising him with modern linear economic theory (Chakravarty had also reviewed Sraffa’s book which had appeared in 1961 in Arthaniti, the journal of the Department of Economics, University of Calcutta). I reproduce an excerpt from the book’s preface where Bose describes his reason for being impressed with Sraffa’s work:

‘Piero Sraffa impressed me with his conviction that it was perfectly possible, though difficult, to develop a theory of political economy into an exact science, based on absolute precision of concept however much we may approximate in empirical work which would be wielded as effectively as a surgeon’s or a welder’s tools, to dissect or dismantle, and then reassemble the ‘unseen’ interconnections of the economic process, whose cognition is essential for revolutionary political action’ (p. 11; also reproduced in my Artha Vijnana article on p. 29).’

He went on to publish two follow-up books: Political Paradoxes and Puzzles (1977) and Marx on Exploitation and Inequality: An Essay in Marxian Analytical Economics (1980). While a visiting fellow at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE) during 1976-7, Bose delivered lectures on capital theory. (Today, in India, to the best of my knowledge, capital theory is a full course (albeit elective/optional) only at the University of Hyderabad; Bharadwaj had played an important role in designing their MA Economics curriculum along with Amiya Bagchi, Amit Bhaduri, and K. L. Krishna.) A year before his retirement from Kirori Mal College in 1985, Bose published a letter in the Economic & Political Weekly titled ‘Piero Sraffa’; this was in response to P. R. Brahmananda’s obituary of Sraffa in 1983, also in the form of a letter. Brahmananda had himself engaged with Sraffa’s book in a set of three articles in 1963 in the Indian Economic Journal; these were later reproduced in the first volume of the 4-volume Piero Sraffa: Critical Assessments edited by J. C. Wood (1995, Routledge).’

After his retirement, Bose employed his ‘Sraffian Marxist’ approach within a wider social scientific framework to explain India’s socioeconomic condition. In this period, he published the following: an article each in Economic & Political Weekly (1986) and International Review of Sociology Series I (1987); and two books in 1989 titled Theories of Development of Material and Human Resources and Education: Requiem or Rethinking’ and India’s Social Crisis: An Essay on Capitalism, Socialism, Individualism and Indian Civilization. In his Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani identifies India’s Social Crisis as an important contribution to ‘historical sociology’ (p. 218).’

To conclude, there are enough published works by Arun Bose for someone who is interested in writing a dissertation or thesis in the area of Indian economic thought. Moreover, his notes, manuscripts, and correspondence are available for purposes of research at Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML) although I personally found them to suffer from poor penmanship. It is extremely vital that we engage with the ideas of economists such as Arun Bose who provide an alternative way of understanding our economic surroundings.’

150th Anniversary of Capital: Reading Wage-Labour and Capital (Part II)

This post is second in the two-part commemoration of Capital‘s 150th anniversary (last year); part I was a commentary on Francis Wheen’s biography of Capital and Part II undertakes a critical engagement with Wage-Labour and Capital (available freely at Marxists.org), which were originally lectures, and later published as a set of articles in 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (which roughly translates into the ‘New Rhenish Newspaper’). Marx had delivered the lectures at the German Working Men’s Club of Brussels in 1847, a year before the publication of the Communist Manifesto and twenty years before the publication of Das Kapital.

wage labour capitalWage-Labour and Capital is made up of 9 short chapters, with the largest chapter containing 5 pages, and a total of 48 pages. In the introduction, F. Engels provides his reasons for altering the original text of Marx, and writes ‘this pamphlet is not as Marx wrote it in 1849, but approximately as Marx would have written it in 1891’ (p. 6). To assess the merits of Engel’s editorial intervention, one needs to compare it with Marx’s original. Marx intended his writings to be understood by the workers and therefore they do not ‘presuppose a knowledge of even the most elementary notions of political economy’ (p. 16).

In capitalism, according to Marx, ‘it appears that the capitalist buys their labour with money, and that for money they sell him their labour. But this is merely an illusion. What they actually sell to the capitalist for money is their labour-power’ (p. 17). Therefore, labour-power ‘is a commodity, no more, no less so than is the sugar. The first is measured by the clock, the other by the scales’ (p. 17). And wages is the ‘special name for the price of labour-power’, a ‘peculiar commodity’. The wage-workers, who owns labour-power, does not really have a choice in deciding whether to sell it to the capitalist or not, but is forced to ‘in order to live’ (p. 19). While it appears that the worker has a choice, in essence, she does not (this idea can help transform the dominant labour-leisure trade-off story). Then Marx points out that this feature ‘ the idea of free labour ‘ is particular to capitalism, and not found in slave or feudal societies. While the worker owns labour-power, the capitalist owns ‘raw materials, tools, and means of life’ (p. 20). The following description of work (and life) deserves to be quoted in full.

‘Life for him begins where this activity [work] ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours’ work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed.’ (p. 19)

Subsequently, Marx discusses the determination of commodity prices, which contains an account of competition. The latter is studied in three parts: ‘among the sellers’, ‘among the buyers’, and ‘between the buyers and the sellers’ (p. 21). It is this competition which seeks the highest ‘customary profits’ among the different sectors, and this constant ‘immigration’ (p. 23) tends to equalise the rate of profits across sectors. This force of competition also tends to bring the actual price of a commodity close to its ‘cost of production’ (p. 24). The ‘fluctuations’ occasioned by competition is not an ‘accident’ or exception but the ‘law’ contrary to the accounts of the ‘bourgeois economists’ (p. 24). Thus, ‘In the totality of this disorderly movement is to be found its order’ (p. 24).

Wages are regulated by the cost of production of labour-power, which ‘is the cost required for the maintenance of the labourer as a labourer, and for his education and training as a labourer’ (p. 26). In other words, it is ‘the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker’ (p. 27). Here, Marx is referring to the wages for the entire class of workers and not of an individual worker because ‘millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves’ (p. 27).

Most economists define capital as produced means of production, and this is the starting point of their analysis. But Marx pushes the starting point further and rightly labels capital as ‘accumulated labour’, as the raw materials, instruments, and machines were also created by labour. Capital is also a ‘social relation of production’ (p. 29). As noted earlier, the existence of wage labour is a characteristic of capitalism where workers are forced to sell their labour power to the capitalist in order to live. And as Marx writes, ‘The existence of a class which possesses nothing but the ability to work is a necessary presupposition of capital’ (p. 30). Furthermore, capital, or accumulated labour dominates living labour.

Mainstream (marginalist) economics is built on the marginal productivity theory of distribution which states that under conditions of perfect competition, in equilibrium, workers are paid the marginal product of capital and capitalists get the marginal product of capital ‘ a harmonious explanation of income distribution. In contrast, Marx argues that wages are profit are inversely related pointing to the fundamental conflict characterising income distribution in a capitalist society (p. 37). In the same chapter (VII), Marx outlines two major routes through which profits increase: (1) increase in aggregate demand and (2) technological improvements (see an earlier post on the link between demand, profits, and employment). In the following chapter, Marx reiterates the distributional conflict: ‘the interests of capitals and the interests of wage-labour are diametrically opposed to each other’ (p. 39). And ‘If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened’ (p. 40). This underscores the social nature of economic relations, an aspect which marginalist economics has eschewed with its assumption of the independence of individual preferences.

The following remark about economists by Marx is appropriate for our current times: ‘The economists tell us, to be sure, that those labourers who have been rendered superfluous by machinery find new venues of employment’ (p. 45). I shall end this post by quoting Marx on capitalist accumulation, crises, and exploitation of markets, since it continues to remain relevant today.

”capitalists are compelled ‘ to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on an ever-increasing scale, and for this purpose to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit, in the same measure do they increase the industrial earthquakes, in the midst of which the commercial world can preserve itself only by sacrificing a portion of its wealth, its products, and even its forces of production, to the gods of the lower world ‘ in short, the crises increase. They become more frequent and more violent, if for no other reason, than for this alone, that in the same measure in which the mass of products grows, and therefore the needs for extensive markets, in the same measure does the world market shrink ever more, and ever fewer markets remain to be exploited, since every previous crisis has subjected to the commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but superficially exploited market’ (pp. 47-8)

 

 

 

150th Anniversary of Capital: Reading Francis Wheen’s Biography of Capital (Part I)

wheen-capitalAlthough I had read the three volumes of Capital, three parts of Theories of Surplus-Value, and Grundrisse over the course of my PhD research, all of them merit rereading and I ought to read Marx’s other works. Hence, given that 2017 marks the 150th anniversary of Capital, Volume 1 (first published in 1867), I decided to commemorate it by reading a work of Marx I hadn’t read ‘ Wage-Labour and Capital ‘ and a short biography of Capital by Francis Wheen (2006). I shall present my commentary in two parts as it is too lengthy for one post. Part I is a commentary on Wheen 2006, and part II is on Wage-Labour and Capital.

Despite writing about Steuart, Smith, Ricardo, Sismondi, Malthus, Keynes, Sraffa, Krishna Bharadwaj and many others in several posts, I have dealt with Marx’s ideas exclusively only in one: ‘Is Marx (Ir)relevant’‘. In the next year, I hope to write more on Marx’s economics.

Wheen’s biography of Capital is just about 125 pages. Marx’s Das Capital: A Biography is a three chaptered book dealing with the gestation, birth, and afterlife of Das Capital.

Marx, the studious worker’

According to Wheen, ‘Marx’s character was a curious hybrid of ferocious self-confidence and anguished self-doubt’ (p. 3).’ It was ‘only after many years of spadework in philosophy and literature’ that Marx turned to the study of political economy (p. 7). At the age of seventeen, Marx precociously wrote in a schoolboy essay: ‘Our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them’ (p. 8). [Wheen’s excerpts from Marx which I quote are in ‘double quotes’ and those by Wheen are in ‘single quotes’.]

The reader gets to appreciate Marx’s style of studying from Wheen’s scattered references across the book. Marx had the habit of noting down extracts from all the books he read while at the university. And he read widely. As Wheen writes, ‘This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of research which gave Das Capital its extraordinary breadth of reference’ (pp. 10-11). His use of dialectic is influenced by his early study of Hegel’s (1770’1831) ‘pursuit of contradictions’. He had taken the idea that ‘people create the constitution’ from Ludwig Feuerbach (1804’1872), the German philosopher; Feuerbach had argued that ‘thought arises from being, and not being from thought’ (p. 13). Therefore, humans have to assert themselves as subjects and not as mere objects of capitalism. And to thoroughly engage with the land question, Marx thought it ‘essential to study Russian land-owning relationships from primary sources’ (p. 37). Marx’s data sources included ‘newspapers, parliamentary commissions, factory inspectors and copies of Hansard’ (p. 51); Hansard contains ‘edited verbatim report of proceedings of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords’. Marx’s data on child labourers were taken from English match factory records. [On the importance of using a wider set of data, see English for Economists: Sowvendra’s ‘The Adivasi Will Not Dance’.]

Already well versed in German Philosophy and French politics, Marx set out to educate himself in British economics. As he went along, he kept taking copious notes. These notes, which formed the early rough draft of Das Capital, are commonly known as the Paris manuscripts, published as Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (available for under Rs. 200 from Aakar Books and freely available at Marxists.org).

Marx worked extremely hard. He spent most of 1850-1 in the British Museum reading past issues of The Economist and books on economics. He sat in the Museum’s reading room from 9 AM to 7 PM. In the winter of 1857-8, he used to sit in his study until about 4 AM. When he realised that his ‘rudimentary arithmetic’ would prove inadequate in his economic studies, he undertook a ‘quick revision course in algebra’ (p. 27). Marx felt that his study of algebra was necessary ‘for the benefit of the public’. His ‘nocturnal scribblings’, as Wheen describes them, running to more than 800 pages were published in German in 1953 entitled Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie (popularly known today as simply Grundrisse). And the notes he took in 1862 and 1863 filled more than 1500 pages (p. 32); this was posthumously published as Theories of Surplus-value.

Marx’s intellectual corpus in political economy’

Here is a succinct timeline of Marx’s key works in political economy. At the same time, this is also a timeline of how Marx’s thinking evolved to culminate in Capital.

1844: Paris Manuscripts/Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 {notes; posthumously published}

1847: Wage-Labour and Capital {lectures; published as a set of articles in 1849}

1848: Communist Manifesto (political pamphlet; with Engels)

1857-8: Grundrisse {notes; posthumously published}

1859: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy {Marx’s first book}

1862-3: Theories of Surplus-Value {notes; posthumously published}

1865: Value, Price and Profit {speech; posthumously published}

1867: Capital, vol. 1 {Marx’s second book} (second edition in 1873)

The first manuscript in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 begins with the following sentences: ‘Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitable wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can without him’ (p. 14). This struggle is also found in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In capitalism, Marx writes that, productivity rises by transforming the worker’s ‘lifetime into working time, and ‘ [by dragging] his wife and child beneath the juggernaut of capital’ (p. 15).

Marx’s ‘first small book’ is A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. It was first published in 1859 (in German). [I took the phrase ‘the first small book’ from Maurice Dobb’s introduction to the 1979 English translation brought out by Progress Publishers.] Marx had earlier intended to call Das Capital ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Volume II’ (p. 33). It was Engels who compiled, edited, and published volumes II and III of Capital in 1885 and 1905 respectively; see Regina Roth‘s work which argues that these interventions were often significant. The Theories of Surplus-Value, sometimes called volume IV of Capital, was published by Karl Kautsky in 1905.

Capital: key ideas

In capitalism, commodity carries a specific meaning. Even today, a commodity, at the first sight, appears to be a ‘trivial thing’ (p. 42). Fetishism is the ‘belief that commodities have some mystical intrinsic value’ (p. 43). Instead, the value of commodities, for Marx, owes to the value labour provides. The wages of the workers are determined by subsistence wages, a social and cultural variable unlike in neoclassical (more accurately, marginalist) economics where it is determined by the marginal product of labour (and is a labour clearing wage, that is, there is full employment of labour). Subsistence wages includes ‘education and training’ (p. 49). As Wheen writes, ‘Marx has no illusions about the supposedly sacred symmetry of the law of supply and demand’ (p. 55) which is central to marginalist economics. Indeed, as Wheen notes, ‘The only difference from previous epochs is the guile with which the robbery is concealed from the victims’ (p. 50).

The relation between technological progress and better living standards or higher wages is not as straightforward as in the marginalist growth models of Solow and Romer. In contrast to these models, Marx concludes that greater the productivity, greater is the labour unemployment (p. 56). Thus, Marx writes, ‘It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse’ (p. 57). For Marx, poverty ‘is about the crushing of the human spirit’ (p. 58). In an article published in the New York Review of Books, Jeff Madrick observes: ‘people of all racial and ethnic groups are losing confidence in the core American principle that hard work is a means to upward mobility.’ And as Wheen notes, ‘The average British employee now puts in 80,224 hours over his or her working life, as against 69,000 hours in 1981. ‘ many people have no time for anything beyond labour and sleep’ (p. 59). The effects of technological progress or rising productivity has been very uneven.

What causes crises in capitalism’ According to Marx, ‘The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses’ relative to private investment (p. 61). This key idea resurfaced with vigour in the twentieth century in the seminal works of Michal Kalecki and John Maynard Keynes.

Capital‘s afterlife’

In the Preface to Capital, Marx writes, ‘I assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself’ (pp. 82-3). Undoubtedly, since its first publication, Capital has enabled many individuals to know the capitalist order better. George Bernard Shaw articulates this view clearly: ‘Das Kapital achieved the greatest feat of which a book is capable ‘ that of changing the minds of the people who read it’ (p. 90). However, the initial reception to its publication was ‘muted’. Wheen thinks that it was ‘sheer incomprehension’ and not ‘political enmity’ which explains the ‘muted reaction’ to the publication of Capital.

As Sir John MacDonnell wrote in the Fortnightly Review (March 1875): ‘People may do him the honour of abusing him; read him they do not! (p. 87). Resorting to an ‘authority’ for support without proper reasoning is always troubling. Wheen notes how during the 1917 Russian revolution, the ‘architects ‘ all cited Marx, and Das Kapital in particular, as the divine authority for the correctness of their views’ (p. 98).

Unfortunately, mainstream economics still views income distribution as a harmonious process. That income distribution is a process characterised by conflict and power relations has been ignored, and perhaps even intentionally supressed. These ideas continue to be studied and researched by ‘heterodox’ economists working in the Classical, Marxian, and Keynesian traditions. And one must not confuse ‘new political economy’ with the political economy found in the works of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. It is interesting to note that before the 2007 Global Financial Crisis, economists looked down upon ‘political economy’ but after the crisis, the number of mainstream economists who started doing ‘political economy’ rapidly increased.

Conclusion

Marx’s Capital remains one of the most insightful studies on capitalism. With all the strides in technological progress with respect to global value chains, transnational corporations, industry automation, etc., reading Marx’s Capital enables the reader to see the cells of the capitalist order ‘ impoverished workers.

Let me end this post with Marx’s favourite motto (p. 101): ‘de omnibus dubitandum’ (‘everything should be doubted’).

 

I acknowledge Prasanth Radhakrishnan for his helpful comments.’

A Foreword to Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities

Piero Sraffa’s classic Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (PCMC) was published in 1960. It runs into 87 pages of main text (inclusive of the content list), 6 pages of appendices, less than 3 pages of Preface and a 3-page index. As we pointed out in A Foreword to Keynes’s General Theory, by foreword, we mean the following: ‘The introduction to a literary work, usually stating its subject, purpose, scope, method, etc.’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

The book is subtitled ‘Prelude to a Critique of Political Economy’. This slim book is divided into 3 parts: (1) ‘single-product industries and circulating capital’; (2) ‘multi-product industries and fixed capital’; and an untitled third part containing a single chapter titled ‘Switch in Methods of Production’. In the Preface, Sraffa acknowledges Keynes, A. S. Besicovitch (‘for invaluable mathematical help’), Frank Ramsey and Alister Watson. Sraffa was friends with Gramsci and Wittgenstein. [Ramsey, a friend of Keynes, supervised the 40-year old Wittgenstein’s PhD thesis at the age of 26 (source).] Appendix D contains the ‘references to the literature’ wherein works by Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Torrens, Malthus and Marx are mentioned. As Sraffa writes in the appendix, ‘[t]he connection of this work with the theories of the old classical economists have been alluded to in the Preface. A few references to special points, the source of which may not be obvious, are added here’ (p. 93). The orthodox economists mentioned by Sraffa are Marshall and Wicksteed.

With respect to method, Sraffa adopts the standpoint of the old classical economists ‘ the surplus approach to value and distribution. This is contrast to the orthodox marginalist scarcity approach to value and distribution. In the surplus approach, one distributive variable is exogenously determined. This is in fact a realistic assumption because the rate of interest is set by monetary authorities and the rate of profit can be conceptualised as a sum of the riskless rate of interest (on government securities) and a pure rate of return on capital.

The conception of the ‘system of production and consumption as a circular process’, Sraffa notes in Appendix D, is to be found in Quesnay which ‘stands in striking contrast to the view presented by modern theory [marginalist], of a one-way avenue that leads from ‘Factors of production’ to ‘Consumption goods” (p. 93) [cf. Kurz & Salvadori 2005]. The subject matter of PCMC is the theory of value and distribution ‘ how are relative prices and distributive variables determined’ More specifically, in an economy where the production of commodities is undertaken by means of commodities, how are prices and distributive variables determined’ Sraffa’s correct solution is that ‘the distribution of the surplus must be determined through the same mechanism and at the same time as are the prices of commodities’ (p. 6). What are the data or givens’ (1) size and composition of output; (2) methods of production; and (3) one distributive variable (either the wage rate or profit rate). The first two givens are mentioned in the Preface when Sraffa writes that his ‘investigation is concerned exclusively with such properties of an economic system as do not depend on changes in the scale of production or in the proportions of ‘factors” (p. v). The rationale for the third given is as follows: ”the practice, followed from outset, of treating the wage rather than the rate of profits as the independent variable or ‘given’ quantity’ has been reversed because the ‘rate of profits, as a ratio, has a significance which is independent of any prices, and can well be ‘given’ before the prices are fixed ‘ in particular by the level of the money rates of interest’ (p. 33).

While the scope of PCMC is limited to the subject matter, its implications on general economic theory are far reaching; for instance, his work has implications for the theory of value and distribution (capital theory forms an important part of this). Therefore, his work has positively contributed to the theorising of economic growth and environmental economics. Also, Sraffa’s work is to be a ‘basis for a critique of’ ‘the marginal theory of value and distribution’ (p. vi). Sraffa’s work is a coherent articulation of the theory of value and distribution the classical economists attempted to solve. At the same time, it also forms the basis for a critique of the marginalist theory of value and distribution by underscoring the logical fallacy in treating capital as a quantity independent of prices.

In a sense, the purpose of Sraffa’s work depends on the use that is made of it and there is a growing body of literature emanating from PCMC (a useful survey is Aspromourgos’s 2004 paper titled ‘Sraffian Research Programmes and Unorthodox Economics’). The classical approach to economics has been made more articulate and coherent. By marrying the classical or ‘surplus’ approach to value and distribution with the principle of effective demand, an alternative explanation for the determination of activity levels and economic growth has been developed. Work is also going on in the areas of environmental economics, public debt, monetary economics and history of economic thought, all of which draws upon and/or are inspired by Sraffa’s work.

The Indian readers would be interested to know that an Indian edition of PCMC was published by Vora & Co. Publishers, Bombay (available online). ‘However, PCMC is out of print since 1996 according to Cambridge University Press.

Those of us who are dissatisfied with mainstream neoclassical economics will find valuable insights and an economically superior but modest basis in Sraffa’s work to develop a coherent alternative to the mainstream approach to economic thinking. Particularly fruitful is this research programme when combined with the rich insights of the classical economists and Marx as well as the principle of effective demand of Kalecki and Keynes.