Politicians who continue to welcome contracts with US companies without considering the risks and consequences of total dependency in the years to come are undermining the raison d’etre of the NHS, argues Dr JOHN PUNTIS

DEPENDENCY theory emerged in the 1960s and ’70s as a Marxist critique of the ideology of “modernisation” which argued that “poor” countries could “develop” by following the same path as ”wealthy” capitalist states.
Over a century-and-a-half ago, Marx and Engels declared in The Communist Manifesto that “The bourgeoisie […] has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”
In his 1867 preface to Volume one of Capital, Marx wrote: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”



