I’d say we’ve come about half-way
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My interest is in greening the left.
The “hard left” (i.e., left of the Democratic Party) has been in an ideological cul-de-sac for over a hundred years. Its Marxist-derived theory has been deficient in multiple critical ways and the implementation of its socialist prescriptions has yielded little beyond reforms of the current system.
I think the fate of the left depends upon its ultimate embracing of the paradigm shift represented by the introduction of Green politics after the ferment of the Sixties (see: Rudolf Bahro, Edward Goldsmith, Murray Bookchin, Fredy Perlman, Samuel Alexander). So I’ve viewed the situation as a project to transition the left “from Red to Green.” Here’s a book that came out recently (2018), giving a sense that we might be about half-way toward the full realization of that project:
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People say to me: “Why can’t we just combine Red and Green . . . rather than counterposing the two?” The answer, I believe, is that traditional socialist theory was fatally deficient in fundamental ways: (a) in regard to its interpretation of history (viewed as “progressive development” of higher and higher stages); (b) its delusion about the proletariat being the agency of social change; and (c) its vision of a “democratically owned and controlled” planned economy (it should be clear by now how much of a chimerical notion that turned out to be).
