Don’t Look At It
The Only Place Communism Works Is Inside a Box Nobody Opens
Off the eastern coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal, sits a small island called North Sentinel. It is home to the Sentinelese—a tribe that has lived in isolation for an estimated sixty thousand years and has made its position on outside contact abundantly clear through the repeated killing of anyone who attempts it.
The Indian government’s policy on North Sentinel Island is: leave it alone. No contact. No missionaries. No researchers. No tourists. No boats within a specified exclusion zone. The Sentinelese are fine. They have been fine for sixty thousand years. They will presumably continue to be fine for as long as the policy holds.
The policy holds because everyone with the power to violate it has agreed not to. No competitive interest is being projected onto the island. No one is trying to extract its resources, convert its population, or integrate it into a global supply chain. The box stays closed. The experiment runs undisturbed.
This is the only viable model for communism I have ever been able to identify.
The Cat Problem
Erwin Schrödinger proposed his famous thought experiment in 1935 to illustrate a problem in quantum mechanics: a cat in a sealed box, with a device that may or may not have released poison, exists in a superposition of alive and dead until the box is opened and the cat is observed. The act of observation collapses the wave function. Before you look, both states are equally real. The moment you look, only one is.
Communism is Schrödinger’s cat.
Inside the sealed box—the commune, the campus, the protected ideological enclave—it exists as a viable system. People share resources. Hierarchy is flattened. Everyone contributes according to ability and receives according to need. It’s beautiful. It’s real. The experiment runs.
The moment anyone looks at it with competitive intent—one hawk in a room full of doves, one Western Germany visible across the border from Eastern Germany, one person who has seen what the other side has and wants it—the wave function collapses. The cat was always already dead. You just didn’t know until you looked.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a description of physics. And the physics has been demonstrated repeatedly, at scale, with enormous human cost, across the entire twentieth century. The experiment has been run. We know the results.
The Case Study Problem
Give me one example larger than a commune where it worked.
Not a kibbutz. Kibbutzim are voluntary communities of people who chose to be there, subsidized by a surrounding capitalist state and a global Jewish diaspora fundraising apparatus, operating in a context where leaving is always an option. That’s a monastery. Monasteries work because the monks chose to be there.
Not a matriarchal village in the Amazon. Not a pre-Cortez tribal confederation. Not an isolated African agricultural community. These are Sentinel Islands—they function because nobody is projecting competitive interest onto them, not because they have solved the problem of how to organize a modern industrial economy without markets.
Not China. China survived by immediately carving out Special Economic Zones—explicitly capitalist enclaves within the communist state—as early as 1980, just thirty-one years after the revolution. The experiment admitted it didn’t work at industrial scale before most of the revolutionaries who started it were dead. China today is state capitalism with authoritarian characteristics, which is a real thing but is not communism.
Not Cuba. Cuba has the literacy rate, the homegrown COVID vaccine, the Afro-Cuban jazz that is the greatest music on earth—all real, all worth conceding without qualification. Cuba also has the embargo, which is a real and massive confounding variable. You cannot run a clean experiment on any system when the most powerful economy on earth has been actively strangling it for sixty-five years. The terrarium problem is genuine. But Cuba has been running this system for sixty-five years and the boats to Florida keep going one direction, and that’s not the embargo’s doing—that’s Cubans making the only vote available to them.
Not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union lasted seventy years, spread the ideology across three continents, kept Cuba afloat through trade, matched American military spending during the Cold War. That is a real achievement. It also produced chronic food shortages, a surveillance state that would make Orwell blush, political prisoners counted in the millions, and collapsed from within in roughly three years the moment the external pressure shifted and the internal contradictions became impossible to manage. A system that requires a permanent existential enemy to justify its own failures is not demonstrating resilience. It is demonstrating dependency.
The “it’s never really been tried” argument is the most durable defense of any failed idea in the history of human thought. At some point, the absence of a successful large-scale example is itself the data.
The Game Theory Problem Marx Never Solved
Here is the structural issue that Karl Marx identified, that Friedrich Engels refined, that the Frankfurt School elaborated, and that nobody in the entire tradition ever actually solved.
Communism requires universal cooperation to function. Not near-universal. Not majority. Universal. Every participant must be a dove. The moment one hawk enters the system—one person who decides to take more than they contribute, one enterprise that decides to accumulate rather than distribute, one nation that decides to compete rather than cooperate—the entire structure becomes unstable. The hawk outcompetes the doves. The doves either become hawks or lose. The system collapses toward the equilibrium that markets represent.
This is why communism is internationalist by design. Marx understood that a communist economy surrounded by capitalist economies was a dead man walking. Capital would flee. Talent would emigrate. Goods would be undersold by more efficient producers operating outside the system. The only solution was universal adoption—if the entire world goes communist simultaneously, there is nowhere for the peregrine to fly, no Western Germany visible across the border, no Miami ninety miles away.
But universal adoption requires zero defectors. At any scale. Forever. And every human civilization that has ever existed has produced defectors, because human beings are—as the Bible correctly identifies—envy monsters. Every single one of us. A system that requires the permanent suppression of envy, competition, and the desire for more is not a durable governing philosophy. It is a monastery with nuclear weapons.
And monasteries work because the monks chose to be there.
The Terrarium Principle
The college campus is a working communist utopia.
I mean this seriously. Everyone gets housing, food, healthcare, community, intellectual stimulation, and purpose, at someone else’s expense. Hierarchy is nominally flattened—professors and students eat in the same dining halls, use the same libraries, share the same physical space. Resources are distributed according to need (financial aid) and contribution (merit scholarships). There is a robust social safety net, a grievance resolution system, a code of conduct, and a shared set of values that everyone is expected to publicly endorse.
It works. For four years. For most of the people who go through it.
It works because it is a sealed terrarium with a full-time staff dedicated to keeping Schrödinger the hell away from the cat.
The endowment subsidizes the whole operation—capitalism’s surplus value, accumulated over generations, funding an environment insulated from capitalism’s competitive pressures. The campus police and local law enforcement maintain a protective perimeter, with extra motivation because if a rich lawyer’s kid gets hurt the legal consequences are bottomless. The market doesn’t touch it. Competitive survival pressure doesn’t enter. Bad actors are quietly removed—antisocial behavior or pushing too hard results in that person magically gone and back in New Brunswick before anyone has to confront the structural question of what the system does with people who won’t cooperate.
The force field works until graduation, which is when Schrödinger opens the box.
The experiment works because the box never opens. The question was never whether communism works in a box. The question is what happens when the box opens. We know the answer. It’s called the job market.
The Teacher Problem
The campus is the most visible terrarium but it’s not the only one.
K-12 teachers are another. I taught creative writing in 1996. I know this world. The progressive pedagogy ecosystem—Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Howard Zinn, critical theory filtered through education departments—is an entire ideological infrastructure that operates inside a protected environment without ever having to compete in the open market of ideas.
Teachers are protected by union contracts. They are protected by the invisibility of middle age and the perception of powerlessness—nobody watches what happens in a classroom with any serious attention until suddenly the school board meeting is the hottest ticket in town. They draw government salaries and accrue government pensions while developing and transmitting an ideology that is explicitly hostile to the economic system paying those salaries and funding those pensions. This is not a criticism of individual teachers, many of whom are excellent and dedicated. It is a structural observation.
The pedagogy conferences where these ideas are refined and transmitted are themselves terrariums. The education school curriculum that produces new teachers is a terrarium. The whole apparatus operates inside the force field of public employment, union protection, and institutional inertia, insulated from the competitive pressures that would otherwise test these ideas against alternatives.
The communist utopia doesn’t happen in the streets. It happens in the faculty lounge, the summer camp, the teacher’s conference, the campus quad—everywhere the box stays closed and someone else is paying the electric bill. And the electricity is always paid for by the capitalism the box is critiquing.
They Got The Wrong Internationalism
Marx and Engels wrote in 1848. The railroad was new. The telegraph was new. The steamship was transforming global trade. They understood—correctly—that capitalism was becoming international, that capital was becoming mobile, that the national frame was insufficient for analyzing or resisting it.
Their solution was internationalist communism: workers of the world, unite. If the proletariat of every nation acted in solidarity, crossing national borders the way capital was crossing them, the system could be transformed globally rather than contained nationally.
By the time this idea was being implemented at scale—Russian Revolution, 1917; Chinese Revolution, 1949; Cuban Revolution, 1959—the airplane existed. The telegraph had been followed by the telephone and radio. Capital could move faster than ideology. The moment a communist revolution succeeded anywhere, the talented and the wealthy began leaving immediately, taking their human and financial capital to wherever it was welcomed. The Cuban exile community was on planes to Miami within months of Castro’s victory.
Globalization—the very process that was supposed to enable international socialism—enabled international capital mobility instead. By the time the internet arrived, capital could cross borders in milliseconds. An ideology that requires keeping capital inside a national terrarium was facing a world in which capital had learned to be faster than any wall.
They got the wrong internationalism. The capital got there first.
The Peregrine In The Room
The dove-hawk game theory problem has a simple summary: you cannot build a stable cooperative system that is vulnerable to a single defector, because defectors always appear.
One Western Germany visible across the border from Eastern Germany. One Miami ninety miles from Cuba. One South Korea visible across the DMZ from North Korea. One Shenzhen Special Economic Zone inside China where you can see what markets produce. One person who has been outside and comes back with stories. One smuggled radio. One satellite dish. One internet connection.
The moment one person in the room of doves has seen what the hawk side looks like and found it appealing, the experiment is over. Not immediately—the enforcement apparatus can delay the collapse for decades—but the wave function has collapsed. The cat is already dead. You just haven’t opened the box yet.
This is why every communist government in history has eventually built walls. Not to keep people out. To keep people in. The Berlin Wall was not built to stop Western invasion. It was built because East Germans kept leaving for West Germany and the government couldn’t function with that hemorrhage continuing. The wall was the system admitting, in concrete and barbed wire, that it could not compete with the alternative that its own citizens could see from their windows.
A governing philosophy that has to shoot people to prevent them from choosing something else is not demonstrating the superiority of its model. It is demonstrating the opposite.
You Can’t Make Fetch Happen
The phrase comes from the movie Mean Girls. Gretchen keeps trying to make “fetch” happen as a slang term. It doesn’t catch on. Regina George eventually tells her: “Stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s not going to happen.”
Global communism is fetch.
It is a concept that sounds appealing in the right room, with the right people, under the right conditions—all of which are conditions that do not exist at planetary scale and have never existed. It requires a level of universal human cooperation that has never been achieved in any domain of human activity, ever, including domains with far lower stakes than the organization of an entire economy.
It requires, specifically, that everyone agree not to look at the cat. That eight billion people, across every cultural tradition, every historical grievance, every material incentive, every competitive instinct, every envy monster that the Bible correctly identifies as the baseline human condition—that all of them maintain the no-contact policy with the Sentinel Island simultaneously, with zero defectors, forever.
The Sentinelese are fine because the Indian government is enforcing the perimeter and the rest of the world agrees to stay away. The agreement holds because nobody has a sufficiently strong competing interest in the island. The moment someone finds oil under North Sentinel Island, the policy changes.
There is always oil under the island. There is always a hawk in the room. There is always a West Berlin. There is always a Miami. There is always someone who has been outside and wants to go back, or someone who has never been outside and wants to go.
The cat is always already dead. Leave it in the box. Stop trying to make fetch happen.
A Note On What I’m Not Saying
I am not saying that capitalism is just or that markets are morally neutral or that the current distribution of wealth and power is acceptable. It isn’t. The concentration of wealth at the top of market economies is genuinely obscene, genuinely corrosive to democratic governance, and genuinely resistant to remedy through conventional political means.
I am saying that the proposed alternative has a track record. The track record is: it works in a monastery, it works in a commune, it works in a terrarium with a full-time staff keeping the box closed. At national scale and above, in the presence of competitive alternatives, it produces walls and surveillance states and eventually either collapse or the quiet adoption of market mechanisms under a different name.
The failures are not all America’s fault. Some of them are. The CIA has been kneecapping leftist governments since the 1950s and the record is documented and damning. The embargo on Cuba is real. The interference in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, and elsewhere is real. I concede all of it without qualification.
And the Soviet Union still dismantled itself. And China still needed Shenzhen. And the boats to Florida still go one direction.
The argument “it would have worked if America hadn’t interfered” is the terrarium argument in political form. A system that only works when no competitive alternative exists, and when the most powerful economy on earth agrees to leave it alone, and when none of its own citizens can see or access the alternative—that system has not solved the problem. It has just described the conditions under which the problem doesn’t arise.
The Sentinelese are fine. Leave them alone. But don’t pretend the Sentinelese have developed a scalable model for organizing a modern industrial economy. They haven’t. They’ve developed a model for sixty thousand people on an island who kill anyone who shows them a different option.
That’s the model. That’s what you’re actually proposing. And you can’t make it happen, because the world already has more than sixty thousand people in it, and most of them have already seen the other side.
APPENDIX
Context, Notes, and Glossary
The North Sentinel Island
North Sentinel Island is a small island in the Andaman archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, part of the Indian union territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is home to the Sentinelese, one of the world’s last uncontacted peoples.
The Indian government maintains an exclusion zone around the island and has a formal policy of non-contact, which it has upheld consistently since 1996. The policy exists partly to protect the Sentinelese from outside diseases to which they have no immunity, and partly to respect their demonstrated preference for isolation—communicated through the consistent killing of contact attempts.
The most recent high-profile incident was the 2018 death of American missionary John Allen Chau, who illegally entered the exclusion zone and was killed by arrows. His death generated significant debate about whether his attempt was foolish, faithful, or colonial—but not much debate about the Sentinelese’s right to maintain their isolation.
The Sentinelese are genuinely fine. Population estimates range from 50 to 500. They appear healthy and their society appears stable. The no-contact policy is working.
Schrödinger’s Cat
Erwin Schrödinger proposed his thought experiment in 1935 as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. A cat is placed in a sealed box with a device containing a radioactive atom that has a 50% chance of decaying within an hour. If the atom decays, a Geiger counter triggers a mechanism that releases poison. If not, the cat lives.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation, until the box is opened and the system is observed, the cat exists in a superposition of alive and dead states simultaneously. Schrödinger found this absurd and proposed the thought experiment to illustrate the problem of applying quantum superposition to macroscopic objects.
The thought experiment has since been appropriated for a vast range of philosophical and cultural purposes, most of which Schrödinger did not intend. The version in this essay—using it to describe systems that only function in an unobserved state—is among them.
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a group of German-American critical theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt, founded in 1923. Key figures include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin.
The Frankfurt School synthesized Marxist theory with Freudian psychoanalysis, Weberian sociology, and later with American mass culture criticism. Their work addressed the question of why the working-class revolution Marx predicted had not materialized in the West, concluding that cultural hegemony—the dominance of ruling-class ideas through mass media, popular culture, and education—had produced false consciousness in the proletariat.
Frankfurt School ideas entered American academic culture primarily through the 1960s and have significantly influenced pedagogy, cultural studies, critical theory, and the broader academic left. Herbert Marcuse’s work in particular was influential in the student movements of the 1960s.
The school is frequently cited by conservative critics as the origin of contemporary progressive ideology in American universities, which is partly accurate and significantly oversimplified.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Published in 1968 by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed argues that traditional education is a tool of oppression—what Freire calls the “banking model,” in which teachers deposit information into passive students. Freire proposes instead a “problem-posing” education in which students and teachers engage in dialogue as equals, developing critical consciousness (conscientização) about their social conditions and the systems that oppress them.
The book has sold over a million copies and is one of the most cited academic books in history. It is widely assigned in American education schools and teacher training programs. It has had enormous influence on progressive pedagogy in K-12 and higher education.
Critics argue that it has functioned as an ideological recruiting document for the progressive educational establishment, training teachers to see their primary role as consciousness-raising rather than knowledge transmission. Proponents argue it produces more engaged, critically thinking students.
Glossary
Schrödinger’s communism — The condition of communist economic systems, which appear viable in sealed, subsidized, competition-free environments and collapse when exposed to competitive alternatives. Named by analogy with Schrödinger’s cat: the system exists in a superposition of working and not-working until observed by competitive pressure, at which point it reliably resolves to not-working.
The Sentinel Island model — The only demonstrably stable implementation of radical communal isolation: a small, closed population with no external contact, no competitive alternatives visible, and lethal enforcement of the exclusion zone. Viable at the scale of a few hundred people on a remote island. Not scalable.
The terrarium — Any protected, subsidized, competition-free environment in which progressive or communist ideas can flourish without confronting the conditions that would test them against alternatives. Examples include university campuses, faculty lounges, education school curricula, and progressive nonprofit organizations funded by the surplus value of capitalist enterprises. The terrarium works as long as the box stays closed.
The hawk problem — The game-theory structural flaw in cooperative systems: any system that requires universal cooperation is vulnerable to a single defector, because defectors produce better individual outcomes within the system than cooperators, which incentivizes more defection, which collapses the system. Also called the free-rider problem or the prisoner’s dilemma. Not solved by any communist government in history.
The wrong internationalism — Marx’s correct diagnosis that capitalism was becoming international, paired with an incorrect prediction about which internationalism would arrive first. Capital became internationally mobile before the proletariat achieved international solidarity, which meant every communist economy existed inside a capitalist world-system that could outcompete it for talent and investment. The globalization that was supposed to enable international socialism enabled international capital flight instead.
Fetch — Slang term from the film Mean Girls (2004), used to describe an idea or trend that someone is trying to force into existence through sheer repetition despite its failure to organically catch on. “Stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s not going to happen.” Applied here to global communism: an idea that is appealing in the right protected environments but has consistently failed to achieve organic adoption at scale despite 175 years of enthusiastic promotion.
The monastery problem — The fundamental limitation of voluntarily cooperative systems: they work when everyone has chosen to be there, shares the underlying values, and can leave if they stop sharing them. Monasteries work because the monks chose to be there and can leave if they change their minds. This is not a model for organizing an economy of people who did not choose their circumstances and cannot easily exit.
SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) — See Essay 2 glossary. Relevant here as the epistemological position from which this essay is written: an orientation toward present-tense observable reality rather than narrative arcs of historical inevitability, which produces skepticism toward arguments that a system will work this time because the conditions will finally be right.
Chris Abraham is the founder of Gerris Corp and writes at chrisabraham.substack.com.