This article deals with the scandalous so-called "Private Finance Initiative" in Britain. This process allows private companies to be involved in the building and running of what were formerly public services, such as hospitals, railways, and even schools. Mick Brooks shows quite clearly that the only people to benefit from PFI have been the fat cat capitalists who run the private firms.
After all the talk of an economic revival in the USA, the headlines are now dominated by an epidemic of financial scandals, steep falls on the stock markets, waning confidence and increasing uncertainty. In spite of attempts by the media to present all this as purely a question of a few "bad corporations" the nervousness on the stock markets is in reality the manifestation of a far deeper crisis that expresses itself in extreme instability at every level - economic, social, political and military - on a world scale.
On Saturday, the Financial Times, a leading bourgeois publication, contained a prominent article entitled "Full Marx". Given the current crisis unfolding under their noses, bourgeois academics are once again forced to recognise the important contribution of Marx's analysis of capitalism.