Meeting Pasinetti. Personal recollections and theoretical questioning

The first part of the article offers mainly personal recollections. It recalls the intellectual climate of the 1970s and 1980s, when Marxian value theory, the monetary circuit, and financial Keynesianism shaped the author’s encounter with Pasinetti’s structural dynamics. The discussion then considers: his appraisal of the Sraffa papers in the late 1990s; his methodological distinction between cross-institutional, natural, and institutional levels of analysis; his multisectoral growth model; his formulation of the “Keynesian” and “Harrodian” conditions. A sketch of his theoretical scheme is provided as a prelude to a critical assessment and to elements of a Marxian critique. While acknowledging the elegance and originality of Pasinetti’s framework, the paper argues that it naturalizes labor and capital and remains anchored in real rather than monetary analysis. From a Marxian perspective, capital is constituted through money as a constituent of value, and labor becomes abstract only through the value form. Yet Pasinetti’s contribution can be seen as a rigorous rationalization of the use-value side of the capitalist process, standing in a critical but potentially complementary tension with Marx’s critique of political economy.