A theorist of crisis

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…