Empire’s strait

What can logistics reveal about capitalist economies and the long shadow of empire?Artist Ash Moniz and academic Charmaine Chua  discuss logistics economies, seafarer abandonment and the futures of anti-colonial struggle.

Ash Moniz How do you define logistics?

Charmaine Chua The word “logistics” derives from the Greek logistikē, meaning the art of calculation. The term started to appear frequently during the Napoleonic Wars, when the logistical work of provisioning a massive warfront required the issuing of promissory notes to supply meals and gunpowder to thousands on the battlefield. Alternatively, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten think about logistics as a form of loss prevention that emerged through the transatlantic slave trade and the commodification of bodies, rather than being a strictly militaristic term. In the 1960s and 1970s, the term shifted in its associations away from the calculation of movement towards being a driver of capitalist accumulation. In that definition, logistics became a tool for speeding the turnover of capital, increasing the territories of production, flexibilising the supply chain and expanding capitalist relations through the global interlacing of production and circulation. This shaped the relationship between production and circulation when firms in the Global North began falling in profitability, in what many Marxist scholars have called the long downturn of the 1960s and 1970s.

In my forthcoming book, The Logistics Counterrevolution (2027), I also argue that logistics becomes a crucial capitalist tool for demobilising and defanging the revolutionary possibilities of anti-colonial struggle that were alive in the 1960s. It’s not a coincidence that 1955 was the same year that Malcolm McLean established Sea-Land and invented the shipping container. Twenty nine decolonised Asian and African states gathered at Bandung, Indonesia and asked, “What does economic sovereignty after decolonisation look like?” Logistics is not just about smoothing the circulation of goods, but dismantling alternative visions of global economic redistribution that enliven the Third World Project. My commitment to considering logistics as a 1960s phenomenon is not to say that previous forms were not important. Certainly, all kinds of loss prevention that led to the counter-revolution against the fugitivity of enslaved people were part and parcel of the imperial violence that instigated an era of commercial capitalism.

Logistics has always been a counter-revolutionary force premised on anticipating interruptions and producing capital accumulation in spite of the risks of blockage. In your work, have you found ways of thinking about sabotage and fugitivity that evade the grasp of capital accumulation, where logistics is not just a totalising force?

AM Many issues around seafarer abandonment are rooted in the discrepancy between the ship recorded on file, and the physical ship itself. When a ship is deregistered, it no longer legally exists, even if there’s a person physically trapped on board. There are a lot of instances where the motor of logistics is a ghost, and that lack of inclusion is what logistics operates through.

CC One of your works that I really love is How to Make a Flute (2025), which is about acts of sabotage in the logistics industry. One of the placards is about how you found bite-sized holes by workers who bit a pickle as they were jarring it, or a chocolate bar that had already borne the teeth marks of the worker. Despite all that the logistics economy can account for, sabotage remains one of these strange subterfuge moments. Even if these mundane acts don’t produce any form of organised resistance, they eke out an act of refusal.

Seafarer abandonment illustrates one  of the grand paradoxes of logistics:  for things to move, people are often  conscripted to not move

AM Organised disruption is definitely accounted for. I spent many years focusing on interruptions and disruptions in terms of their relation to leverage. None of these examples has any leverage at all whatsoever. What exists outside of leverage addresses a specific type of almost unspeakable human presence. How to Make a Flute is separated into three stories. One is a film I made with workers at the port of Beirut one year before the explosion, in which they give testimonies about their exploitative conditions. Afterwards, they realised that the film was way too much of a risk in terms of what they were saying. They felt it was dangerous to have someone recording all of it, so they asked to delete everything. I obviously accepted, and we passed the camera around and one by one deleted every single file that we recorded. I think that was interesting because they were talking about how they had no agency, and then they deleted everything. I felt it was a poetic reversal of their accounts and a way to grant themselves agency.

CC How does the logistics industry maximise invisibility through low profit margins, censorship and worker repression?

AM There is an obvious aspect in which everything is out of sight, and bodies and processes are rendered invisible to the greater public. For example, the MV Aman is a ship where a person was stuck on board for four and a half years. Standing in front of that ship, it looks like any other ship. When I was filming that work, there was a whole graveyard of different ships that were stuck in this area, and each represented a story of violence. Here, the worker is no longer a worker when they don’t work for the company. The company doesn’t exist anymore. Their job doesn’t exist anymore.

CC What is visible or invisible is spatially and class determined. The port is fully visible to port workers and seafarers on the shores of Adabiya, Egypt. People for whom the port and its commercialised, dirty setting are not invisible are produced spatially through the uneven divisions of international labour. I think the ways in which many industrialised ports in the Global North make logistics visible are an incredibly efficient means of highly technologised movement. Whereas in many parts of the South, where underdeveloped states are still vying to gain a piece of the logistics pie, instability is made visible through the acts of worker repression that we see in the Strait of Hormuz or in the Gulf of Aden, for example. Logistics is about producing a form of technology-intensive movement and capital that removes the predictability of human labour as much as possible. Alberto Toscano wrote about how we tend to picture the industrial sublime without any human involvement or workers. When the container was invented, it was precisely about preventing loss and worker repression. The container offers cheaper transport that allows a company based in the US to see many parts of the South as interchangeable. The facilitation of movement around the world allows the invisibility of the conditions under which workers are repressed.

Ash, you’ve done a lot of incredible work on seafarer abandonment. Could you explain what it is and what its knock-on effects have been?

AM Seafarer abandonment is a phenomenon in which the ship owner disowns and deregisters their ship for whatever reason, usually financial. In many cases, the people are stuck on board for long periods of time (sometimes years). While it’s horrific that this is even possible, it is a part of a larger context in which seafarers are often trapped on a ship, working beyond contracts, such as when there is no one to replace their shift once it’s over. If one person wants leave and there isn’t a replacement, the person cannot leave the ship. There was also the crew change crisis during Covid-19, when people weren’t allowed to leave ships because to do so would be to enter another country. Due to border regulations at the time, it was more difficult for any worker to enter any country, and so they were just stuck outside them all. At one point, there were 700,000 people stuck on their ships, exceeding their contracts of nine, sometimes even eighteen months.

CC Seafarer abandonment illustrates one of the grand paradoxes of logistics: for things to move, people are often conscripted to not move. We don’t see the workers contained within warehouses or the truckers who leave their families for months at a time to drive across the continent, to get your Amazon product to your doorstep. When I was on a container ship, I observed how many seafarers likened their condition to incarceration and talked about the ship as a floating prison. Most ships are flagged elsewhere, bearing flags of convenience in places like Liberia whilst carrying, for example, Iranian oil – as was the case of an Iranian tanker that was struck by the US in the Straits of Hormuz in June 2026, where three Indian nationals were killed. But they were, of course, on an Iranian tanker. We expect somehow that in the theatre of war the seafarers correspond to the countries in conflict, but in many cases, they are subcontracted into nationalities to move goods to places that they don’t choose. The logistical economy produces a fungibility of the seafarer’s body: where they work, where they go, how they bear the risks of moving through the Gulf of Aden or the Strait of Hormuz, for example, or the risks of piracy. It reveals how logistics regards workers as dispensable in order to prioritise movement.

Ash Moniz, How to Make a Flute, 2025

AM It’s very crude. Ships are defined by the fact that the workers might be from one place, the recruitment agency from a different place, the ship from another, and the ship owner yet another. The flag could represent a completely different place, and the location of the ship could be somewhere else. If you don’t know how to locate anything anymore, then it’s unlocatable. If you don’t know how to define what a country is or what a citizen of that country is, then you’re not a citizen anymore. Furthermore, there’s nothing about a blockade or a disruption that is inherently radical or leftist on its own. A blockade as a method can be used in many other forms. When I think about how these logistical disruptions are playing out in 2026, I think about the fact that Israelis are actively blockading the flow of aid into Gaza. Unfortunately, that’s the most substantial logistical disruption happening in relation to the genocide.

CC The contemporary left has seized the blockade as a way of thinking about anti-imperial struggle in ways that sometimes fetishise interruption, as if interruption itself is a radical strategy. We desire a world in which people in Gaza are not dying at the hands of a genocidal Israeli state, but we are powerless to stop the larger flow of logistics. We live in states that are highly securitised and repressive, especially in Europe and the US, so we do not have the resources to stop, even momentarily, a shipment of weapons to Israel before the state represses us. The blockade presents a difficult conundrum because we need workers’ movements to show solidarity, but those workers’ ability to interrupt flows is incredibly circumscribed. I wish I could chart an end to this narrative that feels positive, but the reality is that the most successful forms of blockade right now are the Israeli blockades of goods into Gaza, and of the US’s blockade of oil into Cuba.

We’ve both spent time on ships and around docks as part of our artistic and academic research. How did your firsthand involvement with workers inform your work? What surprised you?

AM Abstractions took very literal, physical forms: the narrative of the untameable, coercive nature of the sea was often used to justify exploitation. People say that they cannot have permanent contracts because of the inevitable nature of the sea, which is not true because there are shipping companies that do have permanent contracts. There are many reasons for exploitation that are deemed natural. I expected to deconceptualise these by going onboard the ship, but much of the opposite of that was present.

CC You cannot imagine the embodied sense of homesickness and incarceration that workers bear until you’re on the ship with them. The primary way that workers related their experiences to me was through how much they missed home and how much they saw seafaring as a sacrifice of their freedom in order to earn a wage that supports their household. I also found it interesting how Filipino seafarers rationalised the unequal contracts on the ship through their ability to withstand homesickness. The ship I was on had 18 Filipino seafarers and five Europeans. The Europeans were governed by shorter contracts, adjudicated by a Germany-based management firm,

and only on board for three months, whereas Filipino seafarers were on the ship through a subcontract and on the ship for six to nine months at a time. They were also paid about a third of what the Europeans were paid. However, when I asked the Filipino seafarers how they understood this wage inequality, many said it is because as Filipino people, they are built like soldiers and belong to the Asian culture of sacrifice. I started to wonder how the deregulation of global subcontracting relations becomes internalised as racialised understandings of our capacity to suffer. It unfolded a series of historical explorations into the ways that the ship is structured or segregated today, which has much to do with the way that early seafaring in the British Empire was premised on a segregation of racialised subjects of Chinese and Indian seafarers from European seafarers into two halves.

You reflect on the gaps and omissions of critical information embedded in artistic acts, especially when there are legal risks involved. Does the artist reach somewhere that the human geographer cannot, or vice versa?

AM For my project, technically the role of the artist was to make a film, and I failed. That’s what is almost more interesting to me: putting the space between me and the supposed role of the artist and the workers. Because that failure to fulfil the artwork was way more important than if it were actually fulfilled. How do you see your role?

CC Most academics think of their work as uncovering previously untold histories. Certainly in my own work I’ve been trying to make visible the anxieties of a declining empire as a key driver of logistical counter-revolution. But I also think we reach a limit when, as academics or as artists, we assume the role of the person to make something visible, as opposed to the person who is producing the possibilities for people to find agency. I think of myself as much as an organiser as an academic because I saw early on that awareness or visibility reaches a limit. You can see things and still not be able to develop the courage or the willingness to act against them – and that’s where the organiser’s job is a decidedly unsexy one. You are helping people grow their muscles to take on acts of sabotage. While I see myself as a thinker and an intellectual historian, that is entirely separate from the work of new tools for anti-imperial struggle today. That work cannot live on a page or in a gallery and must be forged in and through our willingness to struggle.  .