Yes, first world workers are complicit. That's just a fact. They benefit from exploitation of the global south in various ways (i.e. cheaper prices on imported goods). Many make their living through assisting imperialism. That doesn't mean that the first world working class isn't also exploited or coerced into complicity. It also doesn't mean that imperialism is in their interest. Obviously, socialism is in their interest. Multiple things can be true at once.

Capitalists are trapped in the system as much as the proletariat but are also complicit in its perpetuation. The same goes for imperial core enjoyers. It’s not necessarily about what they “want”, it’s just a fact of world social relations.

It's more accurate to say that they are tools of their sovereign nations. If you're a citizen of the imperial core, you plug into your national economy for your living, you help the national economy run, and your country makes coherent decisions with the power it gets from you to directly or indirectly steal the wealth of peripheral countries.

Talking about someone as "complicit" implies both their ability to comprehend what is going on and their agency to do something about it. "Instrumental" is probably a better way of putting it.

But the more you are aware of the uneven playing field amongst different countries, and the more power you have in your own life, the more complicit you become.

I forget who said this but "I am pretty sure I have paid for at least one the 2000 lbs dropped on Gaza". So yes, complicit. Perhaps not as complicit as someone who is a devoted piece of shit.

Groups like Palestine Action are how you eliminate complicity in the imperial core

You may be thinking about this in the wrong way. You say, for instance:

It’s often suggested that white Americans in particular love third-world exploitation because it directly benefits those same white Americans.

I don't know who would say that white yanks love exploiting the global south. It's simply a fact that they benefit disproportionately from imperialism. Minnesotan Joe Cracker may not even want "child slavery in southern Africa so he can get his cheap electronics" but that child slavery and US-imposed oppression is the mechanism by which he can enjoy his cheap electronics.

Nobody is claiming that yanks can't be poor, suffering, or oppressed. Look at Joe Cracker, who drinks tap water, enjoys the odd McDonald's, and uses an iPhone. These are luxuries for many, many people who lack:

• potable water
• a fully nutritional diet
• road infrastructure
• access to consistent electricity or any kind of telecommunications network, including/never mind WiFi (and yes, it's a luxury—have you considered what it might be like to give birth at night in a place that has no electricity and where you cannot contact a medic to talk you through the process, never mind arrive in time to help?)
• safe indoor ovens for cooking
• it's an endless list – and as bad as things are in the US, for most people that list is substantially shorter.

As Parenti argues, the US ruling class wants the third-worldisation of the US. There is homelessness, non-potable water in Flint, and roads and rail that barely function. Let's look at some statistics to see the other side of the equation.

Note: another comment in this thread tries to work out and explain why a Vietnamese worker is no worse off than a US worker. The logic, unfortunately, distorts the picture. I’ll use four examples to demonstrate that yanks do benefit materially from imperialism, whether they ‘love’ it or choose it or hate it.

On average, yanks benefit materially and significantly from imperialism and suffer less from its harms. Many of these will see themselves as poor. They may be poor. Still, yanks will generally demand a higher stake from the loot and demand not to suffer the consequences long before they consider turning off the tap. This does not mean that yanks cannot be educated to realise their position in imperialism but it's an uphill struggle. For more: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/497897

The Western European diaspora did elect war criminals who commited the fake school Holocausts that that inspired the Nazi Holocaust and they hide the fake school genocide against Indigenous people in the Cold War against Soviets even as they condemn the Nazi for war crimes against Caucasians and Soviets for unproven war crimes. There is the fact that the British diaspora are denying the ongoing atrocities against the Indigenous people like the land thief to create "national parks", Federal Researve concentration camps, planned starvation, planned chemical attacks, planned assaults by Caucasian rapists, plagiarism, and scapegoating for sabotage of reconciliation efforts.

Marcuse is helpful here. The idea that average people in the US are actively considering how to uphold the imperial global order is preposterous. It’s more insidious. I don’t have One Dimensional Man in front of me so here are some paraphrases from the wiki article. As a disclaimer, the parts of 1D man on the USSR are based on analysis of common largely unsubstantiated western assumptions according to a former soviet psychologist I’ve spoken to about it. As they said, the USSR wasn’t maintained so it clearly had some internal concerns with getting people to accept the socialist mission, but that Marcuse’s concepts aren’t especially prescient factors in that situation, anyway:

“Modern industrial societies have furthermore created an "affluent society", which in increasing comfort have disguised the exploitative nature of the system, and have therefore strengthened means of domination and control. Modern "affluent society" therefore limits opportunities for political revolution against capitalism.

Marcuse contends that in contemporary consumer societies, a select few wield the power to shape our conceptions of freedom by offering us the means to purchase our own happiness. In this state of "unfreedom", consumers act irrationally by working more than they are required to in order to fulfill actual basic needs, by ignoring the psychologically destructive effects, by ignoring the waste and environmental damage it causes, and by searching for social connection through material items.

It is even more irrational in the sense that the creation of new products, calling for the disposal of old products, fuels the economy and encourages the need to work more to buy more. An individual loses his humanity and becomes a tool in the industrial machine and a cog in the consumer machine. Additionally, advertising sustains consumerism, which disintegrates societal demeanor, delivered in bulk and informing the masses that happiness can be bought, an idea that is psychologically damaging.”

I think we are mainly discussing intentionality and semantics.

Joe Cracker has no ‘good’ reason for supporting the imperial mission abroad but he does because of media influence, latent nationalism, etc.

I think this gets to a relevant point that the average Joe in any imperialist country has not the smallest clue about how much pain and suffering his lifestyle costs, but it does not change that his lifestyle costs that much pain and suffering, and this whole complicity stuff is some semantic hair splitting and ultimately unproductive, if by complicit you mean part of the system that exploits the subjugated countries, yes they are, but that don't mean much because by this logic most everybody is, even those living in the exploited countries, so if you mean complicit knowingly furthering the exploitation, sure most people do not act like this, in fact I'd wager a very small group does. So this complicit stuff is meaningless because either everybody is or nobody. Once that is understood the point becomes: the enemy isn't Joe cracker from America or Europe, the enemy is the system, that uses Joe cracker as frontline buy seducing him with a small share of the fruits of exploitation. Our job is to dispute the ideological mechanisms that keep Joe cracker in line and show him what could be different with the system changing and what he had to gain, like not worrying about leaving inheritance for the children for no one will ever be destitute, not worrying about cost of health, working less, retiring sooner, have appropriate support if he wants to have children.

TLDR the complicit argument is kinda pointless, and the average Joe is not necessarily our enemy many of those are potential allies once we get them to understand more about how things work.

good god, could gringos read one fucking article about dependency theory, please?

It seems to me that

Instead of making things up you could read e.g. this:

https://anti-imperialist.net/blog/2019/11/13/unequal-exchange-and-the-prospects-of-socialism/

Chapter 5 answers your question but I recommend you read the whole thing to get the entire argument.

tl;dr

as for the title: yes

I think Joe Cracker is actually a little lost in the political wilderness. He's not seeing a solution.

Byung-Chul Han in Burnout Society theorized that in neoliberalism the workers are now oppressing themselves because they are competing on the job market. Even if they unionize, they are oppressed by the need for profitable production, undercutting their own wages to make sure the profit motive is served.

That job isn't guaranteed. Joe has to get his resume sorted. Sell himself. Hit his goals and get that promotion. etc.