By Kamran Nayeri, October 7, 2026
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| Photo credit: New School for Social Research |
This morning, I received the sad news that Anwar Shaikh had died; he was 80 years old. I knew he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer relatively recently.
Shaikh was a professor of economics at the New School for Social Research for 50 years, from 1972 to 2022, when he retired.
He was born in Karachi on October 22, 1945. He spent his early years in many countries, including Turkey, the US, Nigeria, Malaysia, Kuwait, and Canada, as his father worked in Pakistan's foreign service. He graduated from high school in New York City and then received his Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Princeton University in 1965. After teaching at the American School in Kuwait, he enrolled in Columbia University's economics doctoral program and completed his dissertation, Theories of Value and Theories of Distribution, under Ronald Findlay's supervision, in 1973.
During his student years in the
U.S., Shaikh was influenced by the civil rights movement, Malcolm X, the Black
Panthers, and socialist currents.
The turn to political economy
In his interview with Bulgar Moya
(2021), Shaikh recounts his path to political economy and Marx. He said that,
given his direct experience living in many countries, he gravitated to
political economy because he wanted to understand the reasons for
“high levels of
differences in development…how do you help development? And I thought that
economics was the way to go. But when I got there, to Columbia graduate school,
I discovered that development people were supposed to take the standard theory
and use it to explain development. And the standard theory made no sense to me.
Utility maximizing, optimizing, rational expectations, perfect competition just
didn’t seem to me to explain or even represent the world.
“So, I became
involved in trying to consider some other foundations. And that led me to read
Joan Robinson and then Luigi Pasinetti, both Cambridge economists, and then
from there, to go back to Marx and Smith and Ricardo. And as I did that, I
began to see that there was in this alternate tradition a way forward, one that
began from a completely different beginning, which is how people actually
behave, and from that one could derive all the basic tools of micro, and then
talking about how economies behave, and having a macro story. But all the story
had to be fitted together and be consistent from one level to the other. And
had to be consistent with empirical evidence and observations on capitalism.
That took me a long time, a long, long time. It was a long time because I had
to fill gaps. If you read Marx, there’s nothing about trade. If you read
Ricardo, there’s nothing about class struggle, so you can’t just add them
together. Sraffa has nothing about money. I had to develop a framework that was
internally consistent and could answer empirical questions about the modern
world. And that took many years of research, and almost 20 years just to
produce the book. I started writing in 1997, and it came out in 2016.”[1]
Capitalism: Competition,
Conflict, Crisis
Shaikh authored or coauthored three
books, along with many
articles (also see this
link), book chapters, and working
papers. Measuring the Wealth of
Nations (1994), co-authored with E. Ahmet Tonak, was particularly useful for
systematically converting National Accounts measures into Marxian categories for
empirical studies such as the falling rate of profit.
Shaikh’s magnum opus, Competition,
Conflict, Crisis (2016) represents his comprehensive achievement. This is
an enormous (761 pages of text plus 136 pages of appendices and 37 pages of bibliography).
In a book review, John Grahl writes
in New Left Review (2017):
“Anwar Shaikh’s
Capitalism offers the prospect of an intellectual renewal more comprehensive
than any so far attempted. Both the range and the depth of his book, covering
in detail mainstream and heterodox, micro- and macroeconomics, are without
parallel in contemporary literature. Its ambition is not confined to a critique
of prevailing doctrines. Shaikh advances corrected or contrasting views,
supported by statistical evidence, of each central problem with which he deals,
to construct an alternative account of the workings of capitalism and recent
economic developments, particularly in the United States.”
What separates Shaikh from other
heterodox theorists of capitalism is his placement of Marx’s theory of real
competition at the center of the book.
“The theory of
real competition … is the theoretical foundation for the analysis in this book.
The profit motive is inherently expansionary: investors try to recoup more
money than they put in, and if successful, can do it again and again on a
larger scale, colliding with others doing the same. Some succeed, some just
survive, and some fail altogether. This is real competition, antagonistic by
nature and turbulent in operation. It is the central regulating mechanism of
capitalism and is as different from so-called perfect competition as war is
from ballet. Competition within an industry compels individual producers to set
prices that keep them in the game, just as it forces them to lower costs so
that they can cut prices to compete effectively. Costs can be lowered by
cutting wages and increasing the length or intensity of the working day, or at
least by reducing wage growth relative to that of productivity. But these must
contend with the reaction of labor, which is why technical change becomes the
central means over the long run. In this context, individual capitals make
their decisions based on judgments about an intrinsically indeterminate future.
Competition pits seller against seller, seller against buyer, buyer against
buyer, capital against capital, capital against labor, and labor against labor.
Bellum omnium contra omnes' (Shaikh, 2016, p. 14).
Shaikh belonged to a generation of
young Marxist economists who offered a new reading of Marx’s Capital based
on his theory of real competition (Fine1983, pp. 90-930; Nayeri, 2023, pp.
18-28). Since Hilferding's Finance Capital (1910), the socialist
movement has been misinformed into believing that Marx held a neoclassical
theory of Perfect Competition (Nayeri, 2023, pp. 18-28, 123-13). On this basis,
theorists developed imperialism theories in which capitalism had a
“progressive” competitive period that ended in the third half of the nineteenth
century, followed by a “monopoly capitalist” stage that has persisted ever
since, representing a decaying capitalist system. This view remained
uncontested until Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital (1966). Earlier,
Paul Baran used it in Political Economy of Growth (1957) to provide a
“Marxist” version of Dependency Theory. Dependency Theory which was the
intellectual source for Third Worldism.
The theoretical corrections Shaikh
and others offered in the 1960s and 1970s helped undermine Dependency Theory
and Third Worldism and led to a renewed understanding of imperialism as a
manifestation of capital as self-expanding value.
Shaikh as a teacher
Shaikh was an excellent lecturer.
He taught a doctoral-level course on Capital, focusing on specific
aspects of Marx’s theory, such as crisis theory, which he was researching at
the time. Several students became his research assistants. He acknowledges
their contribution to his research in his Capitalism: Competition, Conflict,
Crisis.
Like Shaikh, I was also drawn to
studying political economy because I wanted to learn about the development
problems of latecomers like Iran. However, this awareness coincided with my becoming
an activist socialist in 1971. Soon I became an adherent of Trotsky’s theory of
Permanent Revolution, which argues that, to solve the problem of latecomers'
backwardness, ongoing and expanding socialist revolution is necessary. Thus, I
dedicated my life to socialism; my interest in economics became secondary.
In 1983, when I returned to New
York after three and a half years of participating in the 1979 revolution in
Iran, I decided to study Marx’s Capital and enrolled in the doctoral economics
program at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. However,
the timing was unfortunate: Ross Thomson, who taught the two-semester,
Master’s-level course in Capital, was on sabbatical, and when I took the
doctoral-level course in Capital, Anwar Shaikh was, too. The professors who replaced them were not good
teachers. So, I made up for it by sitting in on Shaikh’s classes after I
finished my coursework and passed my comprehensive exams.
To pursue my interest in the
economic backwardness of latecomers, I wrote my dissertation as a critical
examination of a representative sample of economic development theories. Ross
Thoman graciously agreed to supervise me. While developing my dissertation
proposal, which took two years as I read and summarized various economic
development theories, I needed a foundation for comparatively assessing them. Thus,
I came up with the following solution:
“Because
competition serves as the organizing principle of most economic theories and
the medium of realization of development processes as a whole, it plays a
critical but largely unexamined role in theories of late development. Theories
of competition also play a decisive role in the analysis of the impact of the
capitalist world market on late development. (Nayeri, 2023, p. 7).
Of course, Marx’s theory of real
competition (following Shaikh, I used the term “free competition” at the time;
Shaikh later chose the term “real competition.”) was the most useful dynamic
theory of competition for my purpose. Thus, it was natural to ask Shaikh to
join Ross Thomson on my dissertation committee, and he graciously accepted.
In retrospect, I realized that at
the time Shaikh was plotting his own approach to use Marx’s theory of
competition for what became his magnum opus 28 years later! My approach addressed
a more limited question, theories of late capitalist development, to arrive at
a theory of uneven and combined late capitalist development. Shaikh’s work remade political economy.
I was fortunate to study under
Anwar Shaikh and Ross Thomson. My approach to the economic problem benefits
from their contribution. I have now lost both. Ross Thomson died prematurely on
February 12, 2015, after being a professor of economics at the University of
Vermont since 1991.
References:
Fine, Ben. “Competition.” A
Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurance Harris, V.G.
Kierman, and Ralph Miliband. 1983.
Grahl, John. “A
New Economics.” New Left Review. March/April 2017.
Nayeri, Kamran. The Role of
Competition in Theories of Late Capitalist Development. 1991; _____________. Toward
a Theory of Uneven and Combined Late Capitalist Development. 2023.
Pulgar Moya, Pablo. “An
interview with Anwar Shaikh.” Historical Materialism, May 8, 2021.
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