Thread by @r_bellofiore

This scholarly detailed paper by @workingppl_lead and Andres Lazzarini on newly discovered archival material concerning #PierSraffa is a little jewel. The study Sraffa’s internment in 1940, present secret classified documents .../1

researchgate.net/publication/36…

... What "emerges is a fascinating story of intrigue involving among other things the wielding of power at the highest levels of British society, academia, and government as extraordinary efforts are made at the behest of #JohnMaynardKeynes to ensure his Italian friend and ... /2

... Cambridge colleague is safe and eventually released from confinement."
They also deal with two other episodes: one on the Refugee Scholar program of the Rockefeller Foundation; the other on University in Exile and #NewSchoolforSocialResearch, in 1940. .../3

They finally consider how the interned Sraffa in Sept. 1940 got a pristine copy of a 1938 reprint of Volume I of Marx’s #Capital edited by Dona Torr. Thx to that re-reading Sraffa began to draft in November 1940 the key document «On the Use of the Concept of Surplus Value»./4 ,

The re-reading inaugurated a new understanding of #Marx by Sraffa, which went beyond the results of 1927-1931, the first period of Sraffa papers about #ProductionofCommoditiesbyMeansofCommodities & embodied what (imvh) is a mostly correct interpretation of Marx's #exploitation/5

The note follows what I call the method of comparison (different than in #Croce, #Rubin, or same Sraffa 1960): *Prolongation* of the working day *beyond* the point where workers (as human bearers of labour capacity) would only have produced an equivalent of the value .../6

... of their labour-power and appropriation of this surplus labour and surplus value by capital. The emphasis is on the *fluidity* and *variability* of #livinglabour as *activity*. Thus, the picture is quite different than the usual perspective on exploitation by Marxists .../7

(e.g., #NewInterpretation) and #Sraffists, where the wage is a proportion of a *given* new value. What we have is rather a comparison between a situation where living labour is no more than necessary labour (this is a sort of Schumpeterian circular flow) contrasted with .../8

the prolongation of living labour extracted from the human bearers of labour power, over and above necessary labour. Sraffa quoted from chapter 16, but the point is of course made by Marx in chapter 7. The appreciation of #SraffaafterMarx .../9

... is yet to be properly accomplished, and these kind of "granular" researchs like the one by Scott Carter and Andres Lazzarini are an essential contribution for more theoretical endeavours./10