GenZedong

I think it means whatever someone meant, but often that isn’t elaborated, so often I don’t really know.

I think sometimes they mean that we benefit from imperialism, while other times they mean that we’re jointly and severally guilty of it and/or responsible for it.

I think that many—perhaps most—people think in a moral framework, while others don’t.

I’d say that most of us benefit from it and ought to struggle against it, but I wouldn’t say that each and every one of us is “guilty” of it. Bourgeois democracy is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Not every Russian peasant was guilty of the Tsarist empire’s crimes.

The reparations question I feel is above my pay grade, and the answers probably depend on the material conditions post-dissolution/revolution, and I can’t see that far ahead.

As a non-Statesian, I get a lot of angry thoughts and try to elaborate rants in my head, but I can never find something coherent enough to post. Maybe, one day I'll start working it down and see if I can make a nice writeup. For now, you'll have to bear with me the key points of the rants:

• Nowhere in the world the populance can have guns this easily and legally;
• And even to add insult to injury, usually, the most reactionaries love in states where the gun laws are the loosest;
• I do believe that the ruling class believes that they can get away with it because the amount of propaganda, so people don't rebel and can't connect the dots that some violence with proper ML thought could just topple everything;
• And even when someone does connect the dots, either they can't act on it, due to getting on a list, or be assassinated like the Panthers were.

Again, this is too simplistic and too emotion-laden to be a proper analysis, but I believe my sentiment of complicity stems from this.

It's mostly to explain the unwillingness to confront their own bias and move forward as a revolutionary.

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).

its quite easy for americans to dish this out but impossible for them to accept it. largely malnourished and psychologically ruined japanese populace had the choice to revolt against hirohito so the bombs are ok and also we send them orders to evacuate. russians should dislike their government and home country because we said so, sanctions and racism against them is ok.

we revolt against government? well, we are frail little californian boys and we cant get guns here. we are brainwashed little southerners so we are incapable of turning on our government (even though we are armed to the teeth and dont hesitate to shoot minorities and kids). its not safe for me to be out in the streets, i have so and so disability, i dont wanna lose my job, i have a dog to take care of etc.