ABSTRACT
In Chapter VI of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities Sraffa considered prices ‘from their cost-of-production aspect’ and examined ‘the way in which they “resolve themselves” into wages and profits’ (1960:34). At other points in the same work he employed the concept of a ‘Sub-System’ (section 14 and Appendix A). Our simple purpose here is to bring these two sets of ideas together by applying the ‘dated labour’ type of analysis to a price and distribution system which has already been vertically integrated and to suggest that, in some respects at least, such an analysis is even more fruitful in such a context than in Sraffa’s original application of it to a ‘direct’, or unintegrated system. (See Kurz and Salvadori 1995: ch. 6, for a helpful discussion of’Alternative descriptions of a technique’; at p. 175 they propose the name ‘reduction to dated quantities of embodied labour’ for the approach adopted below. See also Pasinetti 1973: section 10; Schefold 1976: section 1.)
