The few people who've read my tweets for a while may have noticed that I consistently write that the time of both revolution and planned reform is over and that the next big political change will be due to some kind of unpredictable "external" shock

I don't think that the coronavirus pandemic is large enough to be it, but it could be. It's the first event I can think of in the last couple of decades that could be

Why is it hovering on the edge of being large enough? Because of a widespread, potentially worldwide change in everyday life. Nothing else has the power to break this system. (No opinion from me on whether the break will lead to something good or bad)

The stupid things being proposed in the US -- like some kind of neoliberal, tested measure for sick leave that affects 20% of workers -- are huge when compared to the bounds of political possibility from before, and also wholly inadequate

If they are proved wholly inadequate in comparison to reality, then the system will break. If not, not. No one really knows what happens after the break

I thought I'd mentioned it in this thread but it must have been another: "external" is in scare quotes because nothing now is really external to our world system other than something like a meteor or a volcano

"external" refers to a sort of disciplinary externality. We consider politics to be a certain kind of human interaction, not the production by the global capitalist system of new diseases by pushing the interface with ecosystem boundaries