ABSTRACT
At the very outset, it may be worthwhile to remind ourselves that Sraffa’s short masterpiece is entitled Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960). Commodities, as Marx had insisted, are not simply goods, but goods produced for the market. Since exchange values or relative prices do not merely remain notional based on subjective utilities, but are formed only when goods assume this character and are actually bought and sold in the market, implicit in the very title of the book might be a suggestion that we are discussing the problem of value and distribution for given levels of productions of various commodities for which adequate market or demand is assumed to exist. In so far as hypothetical changes in distribution of income as an exogenous variable can be considered in this framework, it should be assumed that the corresponding changes in the pattern of demand must still match the scale and pattern of outputs produced by different industries.
