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 nearly 20 years of writing, is not an easy book. It runs into nearly 1,000 pages and I have only been able to digest parts of it, a process aided greatly (and almost singularly) by his video lectures on YouTube. However, its central propositions are clear enough to state plainly — capitalism is driven by the pursuit of profit as a structural consideration. Firms invest, hire, fire, pollute, underpay, and cut corners not out of some moral imperative or ethical inadequacies, but because competition demands it.
Competition, Shaikh insisted, is quite unlike the “decorous ballet” of textbook economics. It is a war, fought with prices, wages, lobbying, disinformation, and whatever else gives one firm an edge over another. In this universe, marked as it is by war, it’s a bit difficult to model markets as tending towards equilibrium (as orthodoxy usually claims). Shaikh, instead, argued that rather than any form of stasis, capitalism fluctuates, overshoots, crashes, recovers, and overshoots again.
What is worth celebrating in Anwar Shaikh’s work is his insistence that economics is never neutral.
Mainstream accounts tend to view these as ‘failures’ (of regulation or rationality). Someone like Shaikh, on the other hand, would see these as systemic features of a mode of production built on separating the producers of value from the means of production.
His writings on so-called externalities generated by this systemic feature of competition are worth dwelling on, given the cost-of-living and ecological crises plaguing the planet. Orthodox economics treats pollution, low wages, and dangerous working conditions as costs that firms impose on society from outside the market, ie, as unfortunate side effects, correctable with the right regulations.
Shaikh went as far as calling this view of externality a conceptual fraud. Rather than by accident, a firm pollutes because the alternative — investing in cleaner production — costs money that would otherwise be profit. The extraction and pollution are thus internal to how profit works. The same point has also been made at a more philosophical level by theorist Alysa Battistoni, who argues how nature is classified as a “free gift” under capitalism, ie, as something that does not carry with it the moral force of reciprocity or care (unlike a real gift).
Beyond the intricate debates with the mainstream, what is worth celebrating in Shaikh’s work is his insistence that economics is never neutral. In his own words, he asserted that “there is no such thing as a value-free or socially neutral economics”. Every model encodes assumptions about how society works and who it works for. The amnesty schemes, the short-lived consumption-led booms, the stabilisation programmes that periodically arrive with the IMF, the growth targets announced at press conferences, the optimistic narratives about investor confidence and trickle-down are all consequences of choices made in a particular direction and for particular interests.
Shaikh spent his career mapping those choices with a view to uncovering their systemic root in the unceasing motivation for profit. By implication, he ends up showing how reformist ‘tinkering’ that seeks to curtail externalities and fallouts is ultimately futile, and how a far more fundamental overhaul is required.
Shaikh was educated partly at St Patrick’s in Karachi, before finishing his schooling in New York, his undergraduate at Princeton, his doctoral studies at Columbia, and a long career of teaching and research at the New School for Social Research in New York. During that time, he was always on the heterodox edge of the discipline, and concerned with abstract theory, which explains why his work never found the same recognition in a society that otherwise rushes to embrace high-achievers with even the most ephemeral of connections to Pakistan.
However, that biography — from Karachi to a position of heterodox criticality in American academic life — carries a relevant resonance right now. In the face of geopolitical and economic reordering, the questions of whose economics we use, the viability of its long-held orthodoxies, and what they are actually deployed for, matter more urgently in Pakistan and the world at large than at any point in the recent past. It is then truly unfortunate that we have lost one of the clearest thinkers available on such questions.
The writer teaches politics and sociology at Lums.
X: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, October 12th, 2026