I think we're about due for a Wall St Crash Mk II, followed by a move to fascism and violent dictatorship, followed by war, which may be terminal. (Most of Europe would be reduced to a radioactive swamp.)

Isn't that how these things usually end?

Progressives tend to forget that left-leaning movements only make headway when they have the support of the bourgeoisie.

In the UK, Labour would have gotten nowhere was a movement of workers. It was the support of the upper classes that made it a viable political movement.

And then after WWI, aspirations to communism and support for the Soviet Union were a right of passage for most of the Oxbridge crowd.

Today? The Oxbridge crowd mostly want jobs in finance and/or a nice property portfolio. Organised idealism is rather hard to find.

The Parliamentary Labour Party and the Fabian Society are practically camping out of the doorstep of the Tory party. There are some vague lingering remnants of interest in Social Democracy - certainly no Socialism - but even plain old centrism is considered extremist left-wingery now.

And there's nothing new to take the place that socialism used to have. Occupy failed, mainstream progressives in the US are a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington Inc, and Trump is taken seriously as a presidential candidate.

As is Hillary.

There's very little to be optimistic about. Technologically, there's endless scope for change. But it's unlikely to happen without a convulsion that clears away the old zombie form of insane neoliberalism and replaces it with something fresher and better able to imagine and create a humane future.