ABSTRACT
Introduction In his influential book Marx after Sraffa Ian Steedman chastised those Marxists who advocated the view that the labour theory of value was indispensable in an attempt to develop a ‘materialist account of capitalist society’ (1977, p. 14; see also Steedman, 1982). Sraffa (1960), he argued, had provided a ‘definitive solution of certain issues which had long been debated by Marxists’ (pp. 13-14). While designed to lay the foundation for the criticism of marginalist theories of wages, profits, rents and prices, a criticism which, according to Steedman, had by then ‘been carried out successfully’ (p. 13), Sraffa’s analysis had also important implications with respect to Marxist economic theory. These implications Steedman sought to draw out in his book, focusing attention on the determination of the general rate of profits. He expounded:
The Sraffa-based theory of the rate of profits starts, it must be noted, from objective data, referring to elements which might be expected to figure centrally (not, of course, exclusively) in any materialist analysis of history. The latter, it need hardly be said, is crucially important but it does not stand or fall with the analysis of capitalist society based on value magnitudes. On the contrary, the development of a materialist understanding of the history of capitalist economies is now seriously hampered by the continued attention paid to such theory, with all its flaws and all the attendant confusions which they engender so prolifically.
