New Left Review I/112, November-December 1978

Claudio Napoleoni

Sraffa’s ‘Tabula Rasa’

A re-reading of Production of Commodities by means of Commodities has confirmed my initial impression that it is ‘things’ rather than ‘subjects’ which move around in Sraffa’s construction. In other words, it suppresses the first term of the relationship between subjects (at once producers and consumers) and objects (at once products and useful goods). This has the important result that the second term comes to assume what Marx would have called a ‘ghost-like objectivity’. One thinks here of the very title of the book, which is immediately materialized in its content. For what can be meant by saying that commodities are produced by other commodities? How is it possible that out of objects come other objects—as well as a ‘surplus’, or rather a necessarily mysterious growth of matter?

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