Are First-Worlders really "complicit" in Imperialism?

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

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.

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.

1) Unit Labour Costs

The Vietnamese or Indian factory cannot be viewed in isolation even if this is where the product is ’made’. The description is false and hourly wages are not equivalent. The ‘made in’ place is the final assembly point, usually where the head-company finds the lowest unit labour costs. Intan Suwandi summarises why unit labour costs are more important than base hourly wages or similar metrics. She writes in Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (a recommended book, less than 180 pages excluding endnotes) (p. 56):

Unit labor cost is a composite measure, combining data on labor productivity and compensation to assess the price competitiveness of a given set of countries. It is typically presented as the average cost of labor per unit of real output, or the ratio of total hourly compensation to output per hour worked (labor productivity).

There's a chart on p. 59, which:

reports average hourly labor compensation in manufacturing industries in 2017 U.S. dollars, illustrates a massive discrepancy in wage levels that exists between economies of the Global North and Global South. Here, hourly compensation is converted into actual dollars—representing the hegemonic foreign exchange/reserve currency determining the purchase price of labor, profit margins, and international financial flows—rather than applying a purchasing power parity conversion

The chart shows that isolated hourly wages are meaningless. Unit labour costs by state in 2000–14 USD were (approx.):

• Germany $46
• UK $42
• US $38
• Japan $33
• Mexico $7
• Indonesia $4
• China $2
• India $1

The data is not the most recent but here are some other details (endnotes omitted):

In 1996 … a single Nike shoe consisting of fifty-two components was manufactured in five different countries. The entire direct labor cost for the production of a pair of Nike basketball shoes in Vietnam in the late 1990s, retailing for $149.50 in the United States, was $1.50, or 1 percent. Unit labor costs for [PUMA] sneakers … in China in the early 2000s were so low that the hourly profit on each pair of sneakers was more than twenty-eight times greater than the hourly wages workers in China received to make the sneakers.

A 2019 study … interviewed 1,452 Indian women and girls, including children 17 years old or younger—85 percent of whom did home-based work “bound for export to major brands in the United States and the European Union”—[and found] that these workers earn as little as fifteen cents per hour. They “consist almost entirely” of female workers from “historically oppressed ethnic communities” in India, and their work typically involves “finishing touches” like embroidery and beadwork.

These … exploitative economic relations help us understand the reality of labor-value commodity chains and how they relate to global labor arbitrage. In essence, each node or link within a labor-value chain represents a point of profitability. Each central node, and … link in the chain, constitutes a transfer of value (or labor values). This is partially disguised by conventions with respect to GDP accounting and hence ways of computing value added. In effect, as numerous analysts have now shown, labor values generated by production are … not registered as arising in the peripheral countries due to asymmetries in power relations, in which multinational corporations are the key conduits.

Hidden in … pricing and international exchange … is an enormous gross markup on labor costs (rate of surplus value) amounting to super-exploitation, both in the relative sense of above-average rates of exploitation and also, frequently, in the absolute sense of workers paid less than the cost of the reproduction of their labor power.

Suwandi then mentions that much of this wealth goes to 26 billionaires. You might retort that poor Joe does not benefit in the same way as them. He doesn’t. He benefits when those 28 use their wealth to keep the US on top and keep the cheap goods flowing. Are the Nikes and iPhone ‘cheap’ to Joe? Maybe not; but they’re a lot cheaper than they are to Joe’s Indian counterpart, Jewana.

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2) Purchasing Power

Another way of viewing the same equation is considering (i) purchasing power and (ii) the source of wages. (i) I’ll quote myself summarising Zac Cope’s Wealth of (Some) Nations (pp. 34–7):

… keeping the numbers simple.

• Take two workers, one in the global north (A), the other in the south (B)
• A is paid $10/hour to make ’widgets’
• B is paid $1/hour to make widgets
• A and B both make 1 widget an hour and they want to buy each other’s widgets
• B must work 10 hours: 10 x 1$ = $10 = one of A’s widgets @ $10/each
• In the same hours of work, A can buy: 10 x $10 = $100 = one hundred of B’s widgets @ $1/each
• The ratio of purchasing power is 1:100.

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3) Functional Exploitation

(ii) The second example looks at a value chain where one worker is e.g. in India and the other in Minnesota:

How does A [functionally] exploit B? …

• Multinational Company (MNC) makes pens and sells them for $40
• Materials, use of tools, rent, and energy, etc, cost $2
• It takes two hours of labour to produce each pen, one hour each from A and B
• MNC pays A for part of the job and pays B for the other part of the job
• MNC pays A $10 for their hour of work, and pays B $2 for their hour of work: $12 total for labour Production costs are $14 in total, leaving MNC with $26 profit per pen. Forget … for a moment [that the MNC steals] $26 [value] produced by the labour of workers … we are interested in the relationship between A and B (… mediated by MNC)
• If the total cost of labour is $12 and two labour hours are needed to produce each pen, each labour hour costs $6
• If A is paid $10 but only produced $6 worth of value, then A was paid $4 more for their hour of work than they produced
• If B is paid $2 but produced $6 worth of value, then B was paid $4 less for their hour of work than they produced
• The extra $4 given to A comes directly from the value produced by B, meaning A functionally exploits B [even if the MNC exploits both].

A does not wake up and think ‘I’m going to exploit B today’. But it doesn’t matter. By they time they both go to bed, that is what [they did].

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4) Environmental Benefits

Then there is the environmental damage caused by living in the US. The global south will disproportionately pay for the decadence of late stage capitalism but the emissions are overwhelmingly produced in or for the north—a hidden benefit of being poor in the US (not to say that many will not suffer from climate change). Andrew L Fanning and Jason Hickel:

There are 129 countries from the global South in our analysis, which are home to more than 80% of the total population, but their aggregate cumulative emissions surpassed fair shares of the 350 ppm carbon budget only in 2012—more than two decades after the world as a whole[.] … The remaining 39 countries in our analysis are from the global North, and we find this group of high-emitting countries used up its collective fair share of the 350 ppm carbon budget by 1969, then overshot its 1.5 °C fair share by 1986 and then surpassed its 2 °C fair share by 1995 (Fig. 1c). As of 2019, this group of countries has already exceeded its collective fair share of the 1.5 °C carbon budget by more than 2.5 times, with cumulative emissions measured from 1960.

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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

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.