Informit article: Contesting technological modernity

In his reflections a decade ago on forty years of Arena, Guy Rundle observed:

Beneath the surface of current events, a far more substantial change has occurred – the disappearance from the Left political imagination of the possibility of a world transformed in the image of human equality, freedom and possibility (whether it be called the socialist project, communism or whatever). That possibility, which has been the horizon within which political action has been set for so many for so long, has slipped away – at least insofar as any significant group or class of people are concerned. Such a possibility was common to both the old Left and the 1960s New Left, however differently the means and manner of it might have occurred to them, and it remains part of some people’s political imagination today. But large numbers who participate in the activist Left do so without that horizon, and indeed often in determined rejection of it as an alibi for the ethical duty of political struggle.