ABSTRACT

I am not an expert on Sraffa and I will talk very little of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (PCMC), especially because I have not followed seriously the literature that has arisen out of this book. I will devote my time, instead, to discuss a term ‘the Standard composite commodity or, for short, the Standard commodity’ that he used (§26). This expression has been is use for a long time and remained in use during the decades that Sraffa devoted to PCMC. The term ‘standard commodity’ was widely used when discussing monetary problems while the term ‘standard composite commodity’ seems to have been created by Keynes. If somebody wanted to argue that when Sraffa writes the word ‘iron’ he does not mean iron but he really means ‘music’, he would be expected to prove it quite convincingly. By a paradoxical twist, in this case, standard commodity has not been seen as meaning what was usually intended by standard commodity in widely available economic literature at the time.