Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises

Anwar Shaikh's magnum opus, ‘Capitalism’, has been 15 years in the making. Its bases though may be traced back to the 1970s when he was a doctoral student at Columbia, having been trained initially as an engineer. His dissertation developed themes arising from the two Cambridges’ controversies in capital theory, in which he correctly identified as a major reason for the clashes, the respective Schumpeterian ‘visions’ underlying their arguments: the classical, Marxian (and subsequently Keynesian and especially Kaleckian) ‘vision’ of a ruthless and swashbuckling capitalist class (all three) as the driving force of the dynamics of society, on the one hand; the life-time expected utility maximising consumer queen of Irving Fisher's model that still dominates the modern mainstream's approach, on the other hand. Because Shaikh's own ‘vision’ is the first, he was able to develop his devastating critique of Bob Solow's use of the aggregate production function to analyse the respective contributions of capital-deepening and technical progress to the growth in output per head over time (see Solow, 1957, 1974; Shaikh, 1974, 1980; Harcourt, 2013).