Production of commodities by means of commodities and non-uniform rates of profits

Sraffa’s book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities begins with the following (p. 3): Let us consider an extremely simple society …. Commodities are produced by separate industries and are exchanged for one another at a market held after the harvest. One of Sraffa’s objectives is to determine the ... set of exchange‐values which if adopted by the market restores the original distribution of the products and makes it possible for the process to be repeated; such values spring directly from the methods of production (p. 3, emphasis added). so that the system is in a self‐replacing state. Furthermore, Sraffa assumed the rate of profits ... to be uniform in all industries (p. 98), emphasis added. This paper studies the self‐replacing properties of the system without assuming a uniform rate of profits