For 40 years, the ideology popularly known as “neoliberalism” has dominated political decision-making in the English-speaking west.

People hate it. Neoliberalism’s sale of state assets, offshored jobs, stripped services, poorly-invested infrastructure and armies of the forcibly unemployed have delivered, not promised “efficiency” and “flexibility” to communities, but discomfort and misery. The wealth of a few has now swelled to a level of conspicuousness that must politely be considered vulgar yet the philosophy’s entrenched itself so deeply in how governments make decisions and allocate resources that one of its megaphones once declared its triumph “the end of history”.

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It wasn’t, as even he admitted later. And given some of the events of the contemporary political moment, it’s possible to conclude from auguries like smoke rising from a garbage fire and patterns of political blood upon the floor that history may be hastening neoliberalism towards an end that its advocates did not forecast.

Three years ago, I remarked that comedian Russell Brand may have stumbled onto a stirring spirit of the times when his “capitalism sucks” contemplations drew stadium-sized crowds. Beyond Brand – politically and materially – the crowds have only been growing.

Is the political zeitgeist an old spectre up for some new haunting? Or are the times more like a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “the combination of inequality and low wage growth is fuelling discontent. Time to sing a new song.”

In days gone past, they used to slice open an animal’s belly and study the shape of its spilled entrails to find out. But we could just keep an eye on the news.

Here are my seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse:

1. Girl crushes on Sally McManus

The first sign appears with the noise of thunder – personalised in the form of ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, and the trade union movement revival. No Australian of my own generation or younger would likely possess any cultural memory of a trade union leader as hero – let alone one whose packed-to-the-rafters appearance at Melbourne’s Town Hall last week brought with it chants and pennants, t-shirts and cheers a column of selfie-hunters. “We want to see an end to neoliberalism!” she roared to wild applause in the barnstorming style that’s drawing similar crowds across the country. You had to feel sorry for conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen, who rode in to defend business-as-usual in a column entitled “I have to admit a slight girl-crush on ACTU boss Sally McManus”. “She’s really not my type,” McManus retorted. Burnnnn.

Sally McManus (@sallymcmanus) She’s really not my type. pic.twitter.com/7aA1T6hab5

2. Yanis Varoufakis praises the Communist Manifesto

The second bears a great sword – and that’s the dashing former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis. As a scion of very modern political pedigree, he’s an extraordinary (brilliant) choice to pen the new introduction to a re-released Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. A revolutionary provocation considered so incendiary it was banned on its 1848 publication, the book only achieved distribution when its entry into court documents as evidence of sedition legally enabled it to be printed again. Varoufakis’s praise of it in his introduction is no less provocative; he sees the book as a work of prediction. “We cannot end this idiocy individually,” he writes of our present capitalist iteration, “because no market can ever emerge that will provide an antidote to this stupidity. Collective, democratic political action is our only chance for freedom and enjoyment.”

3. Paul Keating’s rejection

It was a year ago that a third sign first appeared, when the dark horse of Australian prime ministers, Paul Keating, made public an on-balance rejection of neoliberal economics. Although Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser instigated Australia’s first neoliberal policies, it was Keating’s architecture of privatisation and deregulation as a Labor treasurer and prime minister that’s most well remembered. Now, “we have a comatose world economy held together by debt and central bank money,” Keating has said, “Liberal economics has run into a dead end and has had no answer to the contemporary malaise.” What does the disavowal mean? In terms of his Labor heir Bill Shorten’s growing appetite for redistributive taxation and close relationship to the union movement, it means “if Bill Shorten becomes PM, the rule of engagement between labour and capital will be rewritten,” according to The Australian this week. Can’t wait!

4. Hipsters picket trendy cafe

The fourth sign comes as the death of a certain kind of pale passivity and acceptance of the status quo among the young. But much as Kendall Jenner got the mood so wrong when she tried to retail Pepsi through the form of a mock riot last year, this week the kids in Melbourne got the times very, very right. On Tuesday, a flash mob of young people descended on no less than hipper-than-hip Northcote coffee palace, Barry, demanding the instant redress of alleged unfair dismissal and wage theft from staff pay packets. Not so long ago, it was the Melbourne fashion for young people to sit at cafes and joke about how exploited at work they were. The evolution to shouty pickets and cafe shut downs indicate in a period of record low wage growth, the laughs have worn quite thin.

5. The reds are back under the beds

There’s always a bit of judgment and vengeance inherent to the factional shenanigans of Australia’s Liberal party, but its refreshed vocabulary warrants inclusion as the fifth sign. Michael Sukkar, the member for Deakin, has been recorded in a dazzling rant declaring war on a “socialist” incursion into a party whose leader is a former merchant banker who pledged to rule for “freedom, the individual and the market” the very day he was anointed. Sukkar’s insistence is wonderful complement to the performance art monologues of former Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop on Sky, where she weekly decries socialism is to blame for everything from alcoholism to energy prices. The reds may not be under the beds quite yet, but if Sukkar’s convinced some commie pinkos are already gatecrashing cocktail events with the blue-tie set, they’re certainly on his mind.

6. Tony Abbott becomes a fan of nationalising assets

Or maybe’s Sukkar’s right about the socialists termiting his beloved Liberal party. How else to explain the earthquake-like paradigm shift represented by the sixth sign? Since when do neoliberal conservatives argue for the renationalisation of infrastructure, as is the push of Tony Abbott’s gang to nationalise the coal-fired Liddell power station? It may be a cynical stunt to take an unscientific stand against climate action, but seizing the means of production remains seizing the means of production, um, comrade. “You know, nationalising assets is what the Liberal party was founded to stop governments doing,” said Turnbull, even as he hid in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains to weather – strange coincidence – yet another Newspoll loss.

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7. Blue-collar billionaires

In the established canon, the final sign, the seventh, installs new saints on to golden altars before praying supplicants. And I’d suggest some circumspection before the incense is lit and venerations begin. A clear electoral yearning for a sincere leadership of politics beyond the neoliberal frame has encouraged lying populists on the right, like the “blue-collar billionaire” opportunistic falsity of Trump. For a left regaining momentum, there’s also danger; seizing at instant, available heroes propels into leadership politicians who are polarising and imperfect for the task.

The pressing need is not to pray for intercession; Varoufakis’s call is right – “collective, democratic political action” is the genuine alternative, and it’s broader democratic investment in the institutions of parties, movements, academies and media that always builds the world to come. That is, after all, what the neoliberals did. And look – just look – how far they got.

• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist