Schrödinger’s Cat Reimagined: A Zapatista Reflection on Oppression and the Box of Capital
Executive Summary
In a metaphor-laden communiqué published in July 2025, the Zapatista movement draws on Schrödinger’s cat paradox to critique capitalist systems, Western progressivism, and the global political order—arguing that true liberation lies in resisting and destroying the structural “box” of oppression rather than negotiating comfort within it.
Analysis
The Zapatista communiqué titled “Of Cats and Boxes” deploys Erwin Schrödinger’s famous quantum physics thought experiment as a metaphor for systemic oppression, transforming it into a searing philosophical and political indictment of the modern world. The “box” is capitalism, and the “cat” is every marginalized group held hostage within it—awaiting arbitrary death via war, poverty, state violence, or institutional neglect. The lethal mechanism is not a theoretical device but the real-world machinery of colonialism, neoliberalism, and global finance.
While the original Schrödinger paradox posits a cat simultaneously alive and dead until observed, the Zapatista text reinterprets this state as one of forced submission, where oppressed peoples are either dead or granted temporary life under highly conditional terms. The possibility of a cat that refuses to enter the box, or one that destroys the box altogether, is presented as the radical alternative — resistance and rebellion not as an act of desperation, but as a path toward real freedom.
Progressivism is sharply criticized as a mechanism of soft complicity. The authors suggest that progressive governance, once in power, merely seeks to humanize the mechanisms of the box — slowing down oppression rather than dismantling it. This “capital-friendly left,” as the communiqué calls it, is condemned for abandoning revolutionary intent in favor of institutional stability and political “realism.”
The analysis pivots to Palestine as the most glaring and urgent example of global complicity in mass violence. The Zapatistas frame Palestinian resistance as a direct rejection of the box, while accusing most governments of not only enabling the violence but actively suppressing global calls to stop it. European states and Western democracies are caricatured as the enablers of capital’s cruelty — mere footmen at a banquet of death, while entities like Russia and China are presented as rival elites with no intention of dismantling the box, only inheriting it.
Ultimately, the communiqué reasserts the Zapatista worldview: liberation is not a question of comfort within oppression but destruction of its foundations. The goal is not survival under capitalism’s conditions, but the creation of entirely new worlds outside its grasp. From the highlands of Chiapas, the call remains the same — resist, rebel, and refuse the logic of the box.
