this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
15 points (100.0% liked)

GenZedong

5218 readers
62 users here now

This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.

See this GitHub page for a collection of sources about socialism, imperialism, and other relevant topics.

This community is for posts about Marxism and geopolitics (including shitposts to some extent). Serious posts can be posted here or in /c/GenZhou. Reactionary or ultra-leftist cringe posts belong in /c/shitreactionariessay or /c/shitultrassay respectively.

We have a Matrix homeserver and a Matrix space. See this thread for more information. If you believe the server may be down, check the status on status.elara.ws.

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I've seen this word said a lot, specifically for Americans. I understand the basic throughline, that Americans benefit from imperialism and thus are complicit in its crimes.

But...what would be the difference in action if they weren't?

There is land back, but that doesn't include what happened in Africa and the middle east. If the average American is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, what do you do about it? Is it just supposed to guilttrip them? Is it reparations? Is it a mass trial of a couple hundred million people...?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I don't think it tends to mean much in practice beyond resolving contradictions. So like, settlers either leaving occupied land or at least having to give back a lot of stewardship to the indigenous. Participant Nazis having to answer for war crimes where feasible, but not every kid in Germany being put on trial.

Some of it just comes down to what's practical. It is not practical to try to hold everybody living in a particular region accountable for something and they would be a strange level of organized and on the same page if they were, in fact, all provable responsible in terms of sharing in the decision-making. Even if you made a moral argument for it and ran with that, it's still impractical to try to hold all of their feet to the fire instead of focusing on the worst offenders and focusing on dismantling the power structures that create and reproduce oppression.

So one could argue, for example, that many of us the world over are in certain ways complicit in capitalism because we buy into it rather than collectively refusing. But even if you can make an airtight moral argument for this, it doesn't make it any more logistically feasible to hold hundreds of millions of people across the world accountable for being complicit in it. Even revolution carries with it elements of the old society into the new one. You can't wipe it clean and start fresh. So if one's goal is to guilt people on purchasing decisions, or guilt them on going along to get along, then maybe arguing for complicity on a very broad scale is useful. But if the goal is to defeat the exploiting classes, it will always come back to limited resources and going after the worst offenders before anything else.

I could be misunderstanding history, but I would figure most of the time, this is the way people think about war, is going after high value targets under heavy material constraints. But colonialism has a different kind of culture, of using technological/military superiority to mass murder or even genocide an entire people. So the calculus for viewing the "offenses" of a people and the complicity of them is completely different; colonialism will say that what one does wrong, the others are responsible for, and use this to justify killing anyone and everyone (and it is possible for colonial-minded people to turn this worldview inward).