Arun Bose on Sraffa:Value Theory and Demand

This paper provides a detailed account of the engagement of Arun Bose (1919-2003), the Marxist economist, with Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960), based on the articles he published in the 1960s in the Economic Journal and Economic Weekly. The paper closely deals with the two fundamental aspects of Bose’s involvement with Sraffa’s 1960 book: (a) the assumption of constante turns to scale and (b) the role of demand in value theory. The Bose-Sraffa engagement yields a useful output – an interpretation of Sraffa’s work, in the tradition of the classical economists.