With the passing of Anwar Shaikh, the left intellectual community has lost one of its most dynamic and brilliant members. Anwar was not just a leading light among heterodox economists; he was the most brilliant Marxist economist of his generation and arguably the most important since Karl Marx himself. He did more than perhaps any other contemporary economist to revive the classical tradition in political economy, associated with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Marx. He then brought that framework to bear on the more short-term dynamics analyzed by the Keynesian tradition, showing that classical economic theory was capable of analyzing the same phenomena and integrating the two into one encompassing framework. And if that was not enough, he accomplished the herculean task of operationalizing Marxian categories to show how the empirical regularities of modern capitalism were governed by the mechanisms that Marx described in the volumes of Capital. In the history of Marxian economics, it is doubtful that there has been any other figure who did more to advance its agenda and put it on a secure footing.

Shaikh was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1945. But because his father was in the Pakistani Foreign Service, he spent many of his formative years in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Turkey. He completed his higher education in the United States with a degree in engineering from Princeton in 1965 and then an economics PhD from Columbia University in 1973. This meant, of course, that he was at the epicenter of the student movements of the time — antiwar, civil rights, and feminist. Like many of the most talented students of his generation, he was radicalized into Marxism and dedicated his singular talents to developing Marxist economic theory.

At the very heart of his research project was the proposition that capitalism is fueled by firms’ ceaseless search for profits. This may seem like an obvious proposition, but the reigning frameworks within heterodox economics in the late 1960s were not well suited to capturing capitalism’s core dynamics. In radical economics, the dominant theoretical framework had been inherited from Vladimir Lenin and Rudolf Hilferding and crystallized in the extremely influential work of Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran in their book, Monopoly Capital. In this account, competitive capitalism had given way to the rule of monopolies in the early twentieth century, so that the competitive dynamics that Marx had analyzed were no longer operative in modern capitalism. Marx’s theory was appropriate to a world of small firms and low fixed costs, the argument went, but the twentieth century firm was highly concentrated, required enormous economies of scale, and was therefore able to deter entry from potential rivals. This was a world in which firms were able to exercise great control over their markets, in contrast to the nineteenth century, when competitive forces subordinated firms to market pressures.