Measuring the Wealth of Nations

* Book: Anwar Shaikh and Ahmet Tonak. Measuring the Wealth of Nations.

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Context

"Anwar’s unpublished 1975 paper, “IO Accounts and Marxian Categories,” and his famous 1978 paper, “National Income Accounts and Marxian Categories,” which circulated from hand to hand almost like samizdat, can be considered early drafts of Measuring the Wealth of Nations, the book we eventually published together in 1994. The 1978 paper contains a preliminary calculation of net tax (taxes on labor income minus expenditures on labor income) covering just three years. This category aimed to show how the capitalist state’s distributional policies affected productive workers and altered the rate of surplus value. In my dissertation, I extended these calculations to cover 1952 to 1980, again using the net tax category.

Later, in two papers on the subject, Anwar and I replaced net tax with the category of net social wage (expenditures on labor income minus taxes on labor income) and questioned whether a welfare state could really be said to exist in the United States. Today there is a substantial body of literature on the net social wage in various countries, including Turkey. My younger colleague Yakup Karabacak and I recently completed the most comprehensive of the Turkish studies, contributing once again to a field of research that Anwar had opened up.

Let me now turn to profit on alienation (POA), a concept that Anwar began using in the 1970s in the context of the transformation problem and that later appeared both in our joint book, Measuring the Wealth of Nations, and in his 2016 magnum opus, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises.

Marxists have generally been reluctant to embrace this concept. After all, under capitalism, the fundamental source of profit is surplus value generated in the sphere of production, while profit on alienation is discussed in the Marxist literature mainly in connection with precapitalist merchant profit.

Yet as my former student Alper Duman and I tried to show in a paper we wrote together, POA also provides a useful starting point for analyzing phenomena within capitalism itself: both privatizations, which have been central to neoliberal policies, and the gains banks extract from workers’ incomes. In that paper, we also sought to operationalize the concept in the Turkish context and estimate it empirically. In a sense, following in Anwar’s footsteps, we gave concrete empirical form to a concept whose importance he had emphasized primarily at the theoretical level."

(https://jacobin.com/2026/10/shaikh-obituary-marxist-economics-teaching)