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Posted: July 12, 2025
Socialist economics brings together economic analysis and anti-imperialist practice, not only to build socialism, but also to combat and overcome the imperialist obstacle preventing us from building socialism. This means we must closely study all tactics, in which practice and theory mutually and effectively reinforce each other, as praxis. A perfect recent encapsulation of this type of praxis is the Palestinian Youth Movement’s Mask Off Maersk campaign, so this week, we’re going to analyze, breakdown, and draw lessons from their recent successes.
To paraphrase the campaign’s purpose from the Mask Off Maersk website, it is “a fight against Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping and logistics companies that directly ships military cargo that facilitate Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.” The campaign is a “People’s Arms Embargo…not waiting for a decision from the top to stop the flow of weapons to Israel, but demanding [it] from the bottom.” They have also put out two crystal clear campaign demands: 1) for Maersk to stop transporting military cargo complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people; and 2) for Maersk to terminate all contracts that support war and genocide, including contracts with the US Department of Defense and the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
So what is Maersk, and what is their role in providing shipping and logistics for the ‘Israeli’ genocide in Gaza? Headquartered in Copenhagen, and controlled by the oligarchic Danish Møller family, Maersk is involved in sea and air freight, operates ports and warehouses, and manages supply chains, with 100k+ employees across 130 countries. In 2024, Maersk made $65B in revenue, with profits of over $7B USD. At the core of their business model is the maintenance and management of the vast and hypercomplex supply chains of modern global trade. Portions of those massive profits were reaped from transporting weapons and military equipment to ‘Israel.’ ‘Israel’ does not have the domestic weapons manufacturing capabilities to undertake this genocide without Western imperialist support. Maersk is therefore one of many logistics companies that enable this support, through their global shipping and logistics services.
Emblematic of Maersk’s role in this process is the production and maintenance of the F-35, the primary warplane used to drop 100,000+ tonnes of ammunition on Gaza by the ‘Israelis.’ The F-35’s global production and supply chain is notoriously dispersed. It is spread between military contractors across the Western imperialist countries like the USA (Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX (formerly Raytheon)) the UK (BAE Systems), and Canada (Centra, Heroux-Devtek, and many American subsidiaries), as a way of ensuring buy-in to Western imperialist projects like NATO. However, getting parts and ammo from these various countries to the small strip of ‘Israeli’ occupied territory, along with the F-35’s infamous unreliability, has made the Gaza genocide a tightly planned production. Coordinating 20+ months of genocidal bombing has required the logistical capabilities of companies like Maersk to ensure a steady flow of weapons and ammunition.
Much like the Yemeni naval blockade led by Ansar-Allah, Mask Off Maersk identified global shipping as a massive vulnerability for the ‘Israeli’ military economy. As an isolated settler colonial outpost of Western imperialism, shipping is particularly important for resupplying the weapons ‘Israeli’ desperately needs to execute the genocide in Gaza. By deciphering the purposefully opaque global supply chains, and unveiling the depth of corporate and government complicity in keeping weapons flowing to ‘Israel,’ Mask Off Maersk has so far succeeded in using economic analysis to achieve their anti-imperialist, anti-genocide goals. This ongoing success has taken many forms. In 2024, Spain became the first country to ban Maersk ships transporting military goods to ‘Israel’ from using its ports (Mask Off Maersk has however since tracked regular military cargo flights from Spain to ‘Israel’). In June 2025, Maersk became the first global shipping company to stop doing business with illegal ‘Israeli’ settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The most important victories from a socialist economics perspective, however, have been the mobilization of dock workers in Europe and North Africa, who, in solidarity with the people of Gaza, have refused to work ships carrying weapons to ‘Israel.’ As shown in the Spain example (moving weapons shipments away from ports to military planes), these ‘top down’ victories are only symbolic unless the necessary labour to physically move weapons and war materials to ‘Israel’ ceases. Let’s take a closer look at what makes Mask Off Maersk such an effective example of socialist economic praxis, and some of the lessons we can glean from it.
Labour holds the cards: In the era of globalized supply chains and weapons production, you cannot commit a genocide without labour. By engaging unions in ports tasked with handling ‘Israeli hot cargo,’ this campaign directly targets the labour that has unknowingly been enabling the ‘Israeli’ genocide, empowering them to use the political force than flows from understanding their economic position.
Direct intervention prevails over ‘accountability’: 21 months of genocide have shown the cost in Palestinian lives that comes from waiting for undemocratic Western imperialist governments to act against a genocide they support. This campaign’s direct interventions in the supply chain showcase both the impotence of government without labour, and the power of the working class to act against government policy.
Deep analysis fuels clarity of action: Rigorous analysis of complex supply chains has uncovered the actual mechanisms behind the Gaza genocide. Without this clarity, it can seem impossible for anti-imperialists to stop our governments’ complicity in genocide, due to the intentional complexity of these supply chains. Deciphering them has further implicated direct Western imperialist support in enabling the Gaza genocide.
A new front of anti-imperialist struggle is opened: While international law has been shown to be toothless, when combined with the Palestinian resistance, campaigns like this, the BDS movement, the Yemeni blockade, tracking and prosecuting IOF soldiers’ war crimes, and many more, the anti-imperialist struggle becomes sophisticated and mature, putting real force behind international legal rulings.
In our next post, we will return to our Economic History of the USSR series, with Part V of this series looking at how the USSR economy survived World War II. If you're interested in these ideas, don't hesitate to reach out. This project is a conversation, not a lecture, so all good faith feedback is encouraged, especially from trained economists.