The intellectual world has lost a towering figure whose work reshaped how we understand capitalism. Anwar Shaikh, who passed away on October 6 at 80 in New York after a prolonged illness, was among the most influential Marxist economists of the past half-century. His contributions transcended the boundaries of conventional economic thought, offering a framework that bridged classical political economy with rigorous empirical analysis. For over four decades, Shaikh stood at the forefront of efforts to develop a coherent alternative to mainstream economics—one grounded in the realities of competition, conflict, and crisis rather than abstract models divorced from actual capitalist dynamics.
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1945, Shaikh's early life was shaped by his father's diplomatic career, which took the family across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Turkey. He completed an engineering degree at Princeton in 1965 before earning a PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1973. His formative years coincided with the upheavals of the 1960s—antiwar protests, the civil rights movement, and feminist struggles—which, like many of his generation's brightest minds, propelled him toward Marxism. He would go on to become Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York, training generations of radical economists.
Shaikh's intellectual legacy rests on his relentless pursuit of a "real economics" rooted in the concept of real competition. Unlike dogmatic Marxists who cited only Marx, Shaikh engaged deeply with diverse theoretical traditions—classical, Keynesian, and even neoclassical—weaving them into a unified framework. He rejected both the neoclassical ideal of "perfect competition" and the post-Keynesian notion of "imperfect competition," arguing instead that capitalism is driven by price-setting, cost-cutting, and turbulent profit-rate equalization. Crises, he demonstrated, are not accidental failures but inevitable products of accumulation and profitability.
Reviving Classical Economics
Shaikh did more than perhaps any contemporary economist to revive the classical tradition of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. He showed that classical theory could analyze the same phenomena as mainstream economics and establish a meeting point between the two. More importantly, he demonstrated that the empirical regularities of modern capitalism align with the mechanisms Marx described in Capital. His work systematically dismantled the myths of textbook economics, grounding theory in history, evidence, and the daily functioning of the real economy.
Central to Shaikh's project was his critique of the monopoly capital school. In the 1970s, a large body of empirical work challenged Sweezy and Baran's thesis that concentration and centralization of capital had overcome competition. Shaikh most successfully demonstrated that the data used to support monopoly theory actually confirmed competitive pressures. He argued that the monopoly school shared the same conceptual foundations as bourgeois economics, failing to offer a genuine alternative. In contrast, his theory of "real competition"—drawn from the classical tradition—emancipated political economy from the dead end of monopoly capitalism, allowing Marx's laws of motion to operate even in an era of giant conglomerates.
Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises
Shaikh's magnum opus, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises, stands as a landmark in Marxian economics. James K. Galbraith suggested no economic treatise so penetrating had appeared in 150 years—since Marx himself. Geoffrey Harcourt called it "possibly the most comprehensive structure since Marx's Capital," while John Grahl in the New Left Review noted its scope invited comparison with Marx's own work. The book applies classical categories to all major economic issues: supply and demand, relative prices, interest rates, financial asset prices, and technological change. It rejects the neoclassical "Economic Man" in favor of actual human behavior under real competition.
At the time, Shaikh deviated from a strict Marxian labor theory of value and Leninist theory, adapting elements closer to Piero Sraffa's physical price theory for empirical analysis. Marxist scholars like Fred Moseley critiqued his iterative and macro-monetary interpretations regarding value transformation into prices of production, debating whether total profit strictly equals total surplus-value under his formulations. His empirical, classical approach to competition and profitability was fundamentally skeptical of top-down economic planning, state interventions, and orthodox socialist programs.
A Life of Engagement
Beyond his scholarship, Shaikh was a person of rare integrity. In an age when many immigrant intellectuals withdrew behind barriers of skin, color, language, or ethnicity, he remained unwavering, refusing to be dictated by social background. He epitomized the qualities of being incredibly learned yet endlessly open and inquisitive, making it a habit to interact with people. He was a philosopher who sought to understand the world system with a fundamentally new perspective—one in which theory was never an end in itself but had to integrate with history, evidence, competition, crisis, and the daily functioning of the real economy.
Anwar Shaikh's passing leaves a void in the left intellectual community. But his legacy endures in the generations of radical economists he trained, in the pathbreaking framework he developed, and in the enduring truth that capitalism can only be understood through the lens of real competition, conflict, and crisis. He was, as Harsh Thakor writes, the most brilliant Marxist economist of his generation—arguably the most relevant since Marx himself.
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*Freelance journalist
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