Commodities do not produce commodities: a critical view of Sraffa's theory of production and prices[Les marchandises ne produisent pas de marchandises: un examen critique de la théorie de la production et des prix de Sraffa]

This paper revisits once more Sraffa's well-known book Production of commodities by means of commodities, and does so by digging up to its very foundations, i.e. its most basic assumptions regarding the nature of production (section 1). This leads to analyzing the definitions of the different categories of goods appearing in Sraffa's book: basic goods, subsistence goods, consumption goods and fixed capital goods. The paper shows why this classification is wrong. It explains why subsistence goods should not be considered as intermediate goods (section 2), that consumption goods are final goods which are not part of a surplus, and that there is no surplus of intermediate goods (section 3). It shows then that the way Sraffa introduces fixed capital goods through joint production does not allow for the existence of a surplus for this kind of goods (section 4), and leads to several contradictions (section 5). These contradictions entail some serious consequences for the Standard system: neither the definition of basic goods nor the notions of surplus and of Standard commodity can be upheld (section 6). It comes therefore as no surprise that the problems created by the introduction of land or other non-produced means of production cannot be resolved (section 7). As developed in section 8, all these limitations explain why Sraffa's system has remained over the years such a puzzle, on which nothing has been built: in particular the system is incompatible with a Keynesian theory of money. Finally section 9 proposes briefly an alternative view of production as a transformation process.