Jim @ https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40779 Sraffa was also a close friend of Gramsci. He sometimes contributed articles to the newspaper that Gramsci edited. Later on, when Sraffa was in the UK and Gramsci was in prison, Sraffa provided the imprisoned Gramsci with various sorts of aid, including financial assistance, and perhaps most importantly, providing him with books which made it possible for Gramsci to continue his intellectual work.
Another snippet from https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail "This brings me to the *coup de grâce*, as it were, in the history of my encounters with Sraffa, albeit at a distance in space and time. I had long been aware that Sraffa supported Gramsci during his prison years in a variety of ways, such as opening an account in Gramsci’s name with a Milan bookstore. But I had never looked into the significance of this in any depth. In 1991, a compact but extremely informative biography of Sraffa by Jean-Pierre Potier was translated from French into English.footnote26 <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail#note-26> The book covers the salient phases of Sraffa’s intellectual and political career, documenting his relations with Keynes and the Cambridge economists of the 1930s and 40s, and even more importantly his work with Gramsci, who was a close friend from his student days. Although never a member of the Italian Communist Party, Sraffa was a key figure among the left intellectuals in Italy struggling to combat fascism. In 1924, for example, there was an open debate between Gramsci and Sraffa in which the latter contended that the revolutionary path to communism was effectively blocked by fascism and that priority had to be given to supporting the bourgeois anti-fascist movement, in order to clear the decks for a better organized working-class movement to pursue its goals. Gramsci disagreed, while recognizing that Sraffa held to revolutionary perspectives in the long run. This debate is taken up in Andy Merrifield’s *Roses for Gramsci*.footnote27 <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail#note-27> Here is another strange connection born out of historical accident. Andy was a student of mine and we have remained close friends for decades. Having relocated to Rome he decided to write a memoir reflecting on Gramsci’s legacy in the current conjuncture. Andy had already written several studies on left thinkers—Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, John Berger—concentrating on their lives and animating preoccupations. His method is to immerse himself in the material circumstances of his subject’s life and writings. He uncovered much more detail about Sraffa’s role during Gramsci’s incarceration, when he offered as much support as he could, at his own expense. The primary contact with Gramsci, however, was his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht. She painstakingly copied out letters from Gramsci to send on to Sraffa. It was primarily she who rescued Gramsci’s notebooks after his death and, possibly with Sraffa’s help, secured their transfer to Moscow. What role Sraffa played in influencing Gramsci’s thinking we shall probably never know, even from the many letters and documents cited in Potier’s book and others that are yet to be published. But if Sraffa could influence Wittgenstein, Keynes and Robinson in such fundamental ways, then surely Gramsci would not have remained unmoved. Gramsci, with his interest in the Southern Question, Americanism and Fordism, the organic intellectuals and a host of other topics is one of my favourite Marxist thinkers, and for this I have, I suspect, Sraffa partly to thank. What future might we predict for ‘that epoch-making book’ as Maurice Dobb liked to call it, *Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities? *That remains an open question. I think it safe to assert, however, that it is more meaningful to work through and with Marx’s contradictions than wallow in Smith’s ‘flat tautologies’. So, here am I, in my ninetieth year, looking back on my career as a geographer interested in explaining, with a little help from Marx, how urbanization and uneven development work, finding myself obliged to some extraordinary scholars, such as Sraffa and Robinson; and to people, events and political currents that open doors to new ways of thinking, hopefully more adequate to confront the central contradictions of our times. It is, however, one thing to open doors but quite another to pass through *en masse*, to explore what might exist on the other side. The American empire that has sheltered capital for so long is starting to crack. This is a moment of opportunity as well as of peril. A little bit of optimism of the intellect is called for, if only to jump-start the optimism of the will." > _,_ > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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