Action Communique Against Maersk Emeryville

Full Communique

To Maersk: THESE ARE THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS.

By shipping weapons and military cargo to Israel, you are arming the genocide of Palestinians. This is in direct violation of international law and fundamental morality.

The components for the F-35 that you ship ignite each night in Gaza with absolute horror. The Oshkosh vehicles that you ship thunder as they split each morning with the cries of those being lead to mass graves. You are merchants of terror and death.

If the government will not stop arming Israel, if they will not hold you accountable- we will.
There will be no refuge from the shame of your crimes. If you have somehow managed to shield your conscience from responsibility with the cover of ignorance, that ends now. We will be the gnawing hollow in your chest as you lie awake in bed. You cannot escape us, because we are everywhere. We stand alongside the global majority of ordinary people who want a free Palestine and an end to the slaughter.

It can end whenever you want.

Arms shipments to Israel make up only a small portion of your portfolio. You have the financial agency to make the right choice. Stand alongside dignity and freedom. End your military shipments to Israel. End your contracts with the IDF and the US Department of Defense. Until then, there will be no peace for you. The choice is yours.

To Americans: The merchants of death own your lives. They profit from your misery.
While you choose between rent and dental work, they use your taxes to fund free healthcare for Israelis. While you swerve potholes in a crumbling infrastructure, Maersk ships industry and supplies overseas. While you stare at your ballot between two dead futures, the merchants of death cheer that their pockets will grow fatter either way. While an ocean of homelessness and misery spills across more streets in America, they tell you that it has to be this way. Babies somewhere far away must be killed, so that you can be kept safe.

Safe from what? Do you feel safe?

As they surveil every inch of your life. As they suck every dollar out of your aging and sick loved ones. As they test their weapons, that will someday come back home to be used against you. As they take away your money, to pay for a war that you don’t need.

The enslavers. The baby killers. The winners of every election, no matter which party wears the mask.

That is who Maersk is. They are your enemy.

You have been told your whole life that you don’t have a choice, that you don’t deserve to be the ruler of your own destiny, because the billionaires know better than you. They have tried to pacify you with toys and scraps and empty dreams.

But gas keeps getting higher. Relationships keep getting thinner. Life keeps getting shorter.
Who is benefitting from all of this?

The billionaire class and their merchants of death have no allegiance to any country, creed, people, or moral code. They are not here for you. Their money is stolen.

Here’s the thing: there are more of us than there are of them. We can reorganize their world to work for us instead. We build the world. We can shut it down, if we focus our energies on their weakpoints. Maersk is one of those weakpoints.

Join us, and stand with humanity and freedom. If you don’t know where to start, join a local organization fighting for liberation and against imperialism. Or take action with people you trust not to rat you out. It turns out that the supply lines that run the world for our masters are all too vulnerable.

Now you have a choice.
p.s. free luigi

To our comrades: Our loved ones, who we have marched with, spent sleepless nights planning with, spent years dreaming with. We have walked further down the path of revolution in the last year than ever before. We are convinced, now more than ever, that it is only through the power of the people, united in mass action, that Palestine will be free. Even as the horror unfolds, we are so blessed to be building a mass movement. It is one of the purest expressions of love. Thank you, for every step of the way so far.

The revolution is not like starting an engine. It builds and grows instead like an ecosystem, a fractal pattern moving ever towards describing the face of liberation. Every bridge shut down, every road blocked, every city council meeting, every occupation, every spraypaint tag. Every song sung together. We have politically educated ourselves, and millions more. The world knows who Palestine is now, and that she must be defended.

And now, we are in a new era of the struggle, and we must walk new paths.

The last year of civil disobedience and mass action was crucial. It drew a clear and dividing line between the sides of life and death, and forced the contradictions to reveal themselves. Palestine unmasks the world, and without the last year, that mask would not have slipped. We had to exhaust all illusions of change via the “legitimate” political system. We had to show the whole world what was possible to rationally demand from the bourgeoisie (nothing). The election was its final death knell. Now, everybody knows where they stand.

We must take the steps necessary to build the political organs of a fully independent mass movement which can take political power. Palestine illuminates the path forward- the only path.
This mass movement must be able to win the long term victories in policy and government, without depending on the funding and infrastructure of bourgeois politics. We have seen, with figures like AOC, where that leads. Our power must instead come from the organized masses. The aboveground leadership of the movement must be able to win in the halls of “legitimate” political power, by being able to wield the power of the people outside of it. Through victories in campaigns such as BDS, the aboveground can articulate and set the political mass line for us to all follow.

However-

We must now reckon with the realities of fascism. while the popular uprisings of the last year were necessary, they also exposed the aboveground organizations to looming repression. Non-profits are being stripped of funding, labor is threatened with having the NLRB stripped of power. Our leaders are being criminalized.

We now walk a dialectic that has been sharpened into a knife. On one side: our enemies expect us to choose to cower in fear. On the other: we continue to mount massive expenses in resources and energy, martyring ourselves by operating as we have.

We assert that in order for the aboveground to be able to continue to grow the mass movement, it must be protected. The power of an organized proletariat is the only way to win, as we can see in the port strikes and blockades against Maersk and Zim around the world.

At the same time, we CANNOT turn away from holding power in the streets, outside of the halls of the bourgeoisie. Without that, we become encircled and isolated. Yet, leading actions that catch criminal charges accelerates repression…

We must begin building an underground that has the capacity to fight and defend the peoples’ movement.

This is not at all a call to armed militarization, nor is it a complete departure from the skills and practices we have built and tested over the last year especially.

Instead, it is a call for the movement to build a real political and ideological unity, that allows for different lanes of action and organization to work together. This will take time and care and struggle to build, but the first Trump administration shows how critical this will be.

When organized Nazis are taking the streets, our movement must be able to mobilize leaders and fighters who can face the consequences of repression, so that it is not used to capsize entire organizations.

When Trump orders the National Guard to begin mass deportation arrests, as he has threatened, this capacity will be needed.

Let’s get to work.