Can't use the ring to do good, Frodo

I think the point of greatest point of departure between me and much of the current "left" movement is its optimism. Specifically, I worry that the expectation of taking power is going to be its undoing.   Power is concentrated wealth. The purpose of a leftist movement is to de-concentrate and redistribute wealth. You can't just take the ring and use it to do good. It corrupts everything it touches and always has to be destroyed.  (I'm very sorry. I despise nerd stuff.)

The point is, the work of a leftist politics should not concern itself with taking power but with dismantling it. So called late capitalism may be devouring the world and possibly itself but this doesn't presuppose the emergence of a more just order in its place. The most likely future is entropy, chaos, neo-feudalism, really.  Anyway here is an article for you to read.

The demise of capitalism so defined is unlikely to follow anyone’s blueprint. As the decay progresses, it is bound to provoke political protests and manifold attempts at collective intervention. But for a long time, these are likely to remain of the Luddite sort: local, dispersed, uncoordinated, ‘primitive’—adding to the disorder while unable to create a new order, at best unintentionally helping it to come about. One might think that a long-lasting crisis of this sort would open up more than a few windows of opportunity for reformist or revolutionary agency. It seems, however, that disorganized capitalism is disorganizing not only itself but its opposition as well, depriving it of the capacity either to defeat capitalism or to rescue it. For capitalism to end, then, it must provide for its own destruction—which, I would argue, is exactly what we are witnessing today. 

I might actually be more pessimistic than Streeck there. The way I see it, concentrated wealth and power tends to be a self-sustaining phenomenon. Any individual who amasses a significant amount of it thus becomes part of the problem.  There's no rational reason to believe "socialism will win." Thus far it has managed to defy that expectation, anyway.  I see no reason it can't go on this way pretty much forever.

That doesn't mean you don't keep pressing on in the face of all that, of course. It's just that the state of political equilibrium is always going to involve someone tilting at windmills. Understanding this as the fundamental permanent condition can be liberating. It frees us to do whatever work we can, however futile and insufficient, to mitigate the damage.

Predicting the future is boring anyway.  We can assume everything is going to shit (it is) or we can assume everything is going to be fine. Either way, if our response is to value only the things that directly affect our own personal success and welfare regardless of the fate of the world around us well then we are still just useless assholes.  And if taking and exercising power is the ultimate goal of any leftist political movement, then that is always going to be a losing proposition.