ABSTRACT
In Sraffa’s lectures, the outline of the research project, albeit only the destruens part, that would occupy him for the following 30 years was clearly laid down; his main point was that there were two distinct theories of distribution, classical and marginalist; the latter alone was the foundation of demand and supply analysis. See, for instance, the following passage:
For Marshall wages, interest and profits, are simply shares in the product; they are co-ordinate quantities, that can be regarded as acting upon the value of the product in the same way. It is not necessary for the actual goods which compose real wages and profits to be in existence at the beginning of the process of production-the hope, or the promise of these goods is equally effective as an inducement. . . . Petty and all the classics, on the contrary, take the opposite view. They don’t regard at all wages as an inducement; they regard them as a necessary means of enabling the worker to perform his work.4
