There was of course Sraffa's friendship with Gramsci whom he courageously visited in prison (before leaving Italy entirely). It is important to remember that in the left in many countries at this time - post WWI - there was not yet the large and irreconcilable divide that emerged over the Soviet Union (and, of course, Stalin was largely unknown so it is a bit anachronistic to call Sraffa Stalinist based on this period). Sraffa also had close personal (and professional/intellectual) relationships with several key people who were forming the key Italian non-Marxist socialist parties. Indeed the famous non-marxist socialist Carlo Rosselli, a key leader of the Partito Socialista Unitario (which had split from the Italian Socialist Party in the '20s) was Sraffa's cousin and collaborator. Many people straddled what was later to become different camps - in the early 1920s the Italian Socialist Party contained almost all of the various socialist types (marxist and non-marxist; 2nd and 3rd International). One can only speculate where Sraffa would have wound up had he not gone into exile and (apparently) avoided any political involvements in England. This is akin to the large and speculative debates of how Gramsci would have reacted to "Stalinism" had he not been locked away and then died (except that Sraffa was far, far less 'political' than Gramsci). [There is a similar debate about the Peruvian early leader of Latin American socialism, Mariategui, sometimes called the 'Gramsci of the Andes', who also died prematurely in the '20s.]
In fact, to me, the close interchange among various parts of the left in this period is part of what makes social and political thought of the 1920's so relevant to us today, now that the Soviet Union is gone. Partly it is like the influence of plate tectonics on evolution; but partly to remind us that we are now free to re-make our own ideas.
Paul
JKS writes:
>Anyway, W was not a political theorist, true, although
>he was apparently personally attracted to Communism
>theoretically. He was a friend of the Marxist
>(Stalinist_ neo-Ricardan economist Piero Sraffa, whom
>he acknowledges in the preface to the Investigations.
and in a later post writes:I like the story about why Sraffa stopped talking to
>W. (I actually met Sraffa in 1980-81.)