Piero Sraffa’s The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is the seminal attempt to create a physical, rather than a social, numeraire to measure the price of commodities. Sraffa’s physical numeraire is predicated on the physical identity and, therefore, direct commensurability of inputs and outputs. It is considered to be the viable alternative to Ricardo and Marx’s social numeraire that used labour time to measure the value of incommensurate inputs and outputs. Sraffa’s assumption of the identity of inputs and outputs contradicts the essential nature of the production process itself, where human activity changes one set of inputs into a different, and therefore incommensurate, set of outputs. This false premise underpins every critique of labour value theory, including from Samuelson and Steedman. Paradoxically, Sraffa’s assumptions also underpin the work of Marxists, notably Freeman and Kliman, who attempt to defend labour value theory in models where it does not apply.

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The assumption that capitalist globalization has been a period of overall stagnation is the dominant consensus opinion within Marxist political economy. This paper criticizes this opinion and shows that it rests on a mis-measure of the transition of the centrally planned economics of the ex-USSR, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and China developed by the official statistical agencies during the Cold War. This mis-measure has the effect of underestimating both the collapse of physical output in the ex-USSR and CEE during the transition and underestimating the growth of genuine national income after the creation of market economies where previously there had been none. This paper develops some alternative, much higher, estimates of the real growth of national income during the transition period.

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This article examines the physical price system of Piero Sraffa. Sraffa’s system is presented as a physical model of production, which provides an internally consistent and so logically superior alternative to Marx’s allegedly inconsistent labour theory of value. This article does not contest the internal consistency of Sraffa’s logic but demonstrates that its logic contradicts every actual process of production. Production, defined as the human labour process that transforms one set of physical inputs into a different set of physical outputs, is a process of physical change by definition, which in capitalist production means that outputs are physically incommensurate to, or different from, inputs. This article focuses on several key issues; commensurability, the standard commodity or physical numeraire; the relation between Sraffian and Leontief’s production matrix, including Quesnay’s Tableau Économique; and the production of surplus. It finds that Sraffa’s physical price system is not a model of production at all, it is a mathematically correct model of nothing. It is reproduction without production.

This comment responds to Fabio Anderaos de Araujo’s article “Sraffa and the Labour Theory of Value: a note” (Araujo 2019), and specifically addresses the issue of commensurability originally developed in Jefferies (2015).

This article addresses how Marxist economists have estimated the quantity of fixed and circulating capital advanced in the denominator of the rate of profit calculation. Generally, Marxist economists have used neoclassical fixed capital estimates of opportunity cost, as applied most notably, in the US system of national accounts. These Hulten and Wyckoff measures aggregate the lifetime revenues (both costs and profits) of fixed assets and so grossly over estimate the value of the fixed capital stock. This article applies the Internal Revenue Service Depreciable Assets less Depreciation for a more accurate estimate of the actual quantity of fixed capital advanced. Furthermore, it criticises the absence of a convincing measure of the rate of turnover of Marx’s circuit of capital accumulation M . . . C . . . P . . . C’ . . . M’ in most rate of profit estimates. Developing the work of Bertrand and Fauqueur, this article demonstrates that the cash conversion cycle or net operating cycle mirrors Marx’s circuit. This article applies the cash conversion cycle to Internal Revenue Service Total Corporations data 1964–2017 to estimate the rate of turnover. The article addresses the distinction between unproductive and productive output and develops an estimation of those respective quantities based on Internal Revenue Service data. It combines these elements together to estimate the US rate of profit from 1964 to 2017. It finds that the US rate of profit rose strongly, albeit with dramatic fluctuations, after 2001.