BORN in Karachi in 1945, Anwar Shaikh, a giant of Marxian economics and professor at The New School in New York, passed away last week. His father served in the Foreign Service as a result of which his family moved around frequently, through Malaysia, Canada, Kuwait, and finally the US. It was in Kuwait, he would later say in a biographical note from 2016, that economics first claimed him: standing amid the gleaming infrastructure of an oil economy, he could not reconcile the scale of wealth with the poverty of those who produced it. The obvious question was why. He spent the next half-century building an answer to this and its related questions.

I came to Shaikh’s work first through an undergraduate class: Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment course, which featured Shaikh’s short four-page elaboration of Marx’s theory of exploitation published in a 1990 reader on Marxian economics compiled by Eatwell, Milgate, and Newman. It was only later on, after having joined academia myself, that I picked up a more sustained interest in his political economy contributions. Many of these were based on the workings of the advanced capitalist world, but to me it felt possible — via a universalist understanding of the capital-labour relation that characterises our shared modernity — that one could recover a broader insight and logic extendable to other contexts as well.

His magnum opus, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises, published by Oxford in 2016 after........

© Dawn