“Heretics always remain tied to the church. To break out, what you do is nail your theses on the door, turn around and develop your own framework.” Most students of Anwar Shaikh, including the coauthors of this piece, will have heard this bold statement in his classes.
As one of the most important radical economists, Shaikh has not only advanced fierce criticisms of mainstream economic theory’s dogmas but also provided his own consistent framework with which to analyze capitalism, grounded in the works of classical political economists and especially Karl Marx.
Shaikh’s 2016 book, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises, combines his radical theorizing over the course of four decades into an integrated, coherent framework. At the heart of it is his unique reconstruction of real competition from the writings of Marx and the identification of the turbulent patterns that characterize capitalism — in other words, his understanding of why capitalism is rooted in conflict rather than harmony.
Another distinctive feature of Shaikh’s approach is the combination of theory and empirical inquiry. Throughout his work, the leading themes remain the centrality of profits for capitalist economies and real competition as their regulating principle.
Shaikh’s thinking has evolved alongside the political struggles of the last fifty years. With nearly a hundred academic papers and many more public articles to his name, it is a challenge to generalize about his ideas. But we can broadly categorize Shaikh’s contribution into four phases.
The first phase involved criticizing the economic mainstream and reconstructing Marxist concepts as alternatives in the 1970s and ’80s. The second was his development of a consistent approach to macro-dynamics and international trade in the 1980s and ’90s.
Shaikh’s thinking has evolved alongside the political struggles of the last fifty years.
The third phase saw the construction of appropriate empirical grounds on which to…
Auteur: Güney Işıkara
