Jonny Jones

The looming general election and the possibility of a Tory government have reignited debates about the nature of the Labour Party and whether or not socialists should call for people to "hold their nose" and vote for it. From privatisation and the MPs' expenses scandal to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, New Labour has betrayed the hopes of millions of voters. But do these betrayals mean that Labour is now just the same as the Tories?

Lenin once wrote of politics, "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." For people around the world, rich and poor, young and old, this statement could rarely have rung more true than late in 2008 when the economic orthodoxy came down to earth with an almighty bump.

In his 1958 essay "Culture is Ordinary", Raymond Williams writes of his time in university that he was "in no mood, as I walked about Cambridge, to feel glad that I had been thought deserving; I was no better and no worse than the people I came from…because of this, I got angry at my friend's talk about the ignorant masses."

In his Economics Transformed: Discovering the Brilliance of Marx, Robert Albritton has attempted to take academic economics to task by arguing for the need to take on board Marx's method in order to understand the economy. In doing so, he not only forcefully exhibits how (in Marx's words) their "crass empiricism turns into false metaphysics [and] scholasticism", but also exposes how his own shortcomings in understanding Marx's method leave him unable to offer a credible alternative.