Anwar Shaikh Changed My Life
Economist Anwar Shaikh, who died this month, spent half a century turning Marx’s categories into hard numbers. His first teaching assistant and longtime collaborator remembers the man and the work.
Anwar Shaikh and E. Ahmet Tonak working on their never-completed final project at Tonak’s house in Leeds, Massachusetts, in 2017. (Courtesy of E. Ahmet Tonak)
Anwar Shaikh, one of the most important Marxist economists of his generation, died on October 6 at the age of eighty in New York City.
Two years ago, a conference was held to mark his retirement from the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research, where he had taught for fifty years. I was one of the speakers on the first panel. I opened my talk by adapting the famous first line of Orhan Pamuk’s Yeni Hayat (The New Life), knowing that Pamuk was one of Anwar’s favorite writers: “I met Anwar Shaikh, and my whole life changed!”
That is truly what happened.
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