Silence is Complicity

Liberal Respectability as an Agent of Imperial Complicity

Morning Comrades.

Against the reality of an ongoing capitalist and imperialist genocide that is still taking place in Palestine, with the past weekend having seen a new increase in the hourly horrors committed by Israel, once again being contrasted by a popularised public event, the ESC instead of the Super Bowl this time, a few thoughts from this end, especially in regards to you and I.

We have to abandon the pretence of liberal civility and embrace the uncomfortable, stigmatised posture of revolutionary antagonism. This is not a rhetorical flourish, but a diagnosis of a deep and paralysing contradiction in contemporary anti-capitalist politics—especially within the imperial core. In a political culture dominated by decorum, proceduralism, and the fetish of "respectability," radicals are pressured to dilute their critiques and disguise their rage. The result is a reality that signals dissent while upholding the very moral and institutional codes that preserve capitalist domination. This is more than ideological error; it is a betrayal of class struggle itself. True antagonism cannot remain housebroken. If the point of theory is not merely to interpret the world but to change it, then we must shed the habits of liberal accommodation and embrace the historical role of revolutionaries: to speak with clarity, act with risk, and organise in defiance of power—not with its approval. If anything today is a call to reassert the combative essence of socialist politics and to reject the liberal masquerade that neuters it.

Liberal Respectability as an Agent of Imperial Complicity

Respectability, under capitalism, is a class construct designed to sanitise power and defang dissent. The “respectable” critic of genocide is one who decries mass death in abstract humanitarian terms while refraining from naming its imperial sponsors. This critic operates within the permissible bounds of bourgeois ideology, appealing to universal morality without disrupting the systems of militarism, racial capitalism, and settler-colonialism that produce genocide in the first place.

This liberal framework functions ideologically as Louis Althusser theorised in his concept of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), where institutions like schools, media, and the professions reproduce capitalist relations by producing docile subjects who accept the ruling class’s moral grammar.¹ In such a system, institutional legitimacy requires silencing radical clarity. Expressing solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, or accurately naming Israeli violence as genocide, often leads to professional censure, job loss, or institutional exile. To remain “respectable” is thus to remain complicit.

Marx and Engels long ago identified this dynamic, writing that "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas"—ideas enforced not only by coercion but by the social power of acceptability and decorum.² In this context insistence on breaking with institutional respectability becomes not a personal preference but a revolutionary necessity.

Revolutionary Honesty as Political Obligation

The term “revolutionary honesty” describes the refusal to participate in ideological mystification. It means naming genocidal violence as such and recognising its roots in the global system of imperialist capitalism. Revolutionary honesty asserts that U.S.’, UK’s and Germany’s financial, military, and diplomatic support is not incidental to Israeli apartheid but integral to it.

It also demands support for resistance. As Palestinian scholar Noura Erakat argues, resistance, armed or otherwise, is not a pathology of the oppressed, but a right enshrined in international law and born of historical necessity.³ To speak honestly about Palestine from the West is to affirm this right, even when it offends liberal sensibilities trained to equate colonial violence with "security" and anti-colonial resistance with "terrorism."

The revolutionary obligation to speak plainly echoes Rosa Luxemburg’s defence of radical clarity. In her critique of revisionism, she warned that socialists who compromise their analysis to remain within bourgeois respectability become “the surgeon who fears the sight of blood.”⁴ In moments of genocide, honesty is not rhetorical—it is existential.

Material Action from the Imperial Core

Revolutionary honesty must be paired with material acts of resistance. From within the imperial core, opposing genocide means sabotaging its logistical, ideological, and financial infrastructure. This includes:

• Disrupting complicity: Identifying and targeting Western based companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, such as arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon), surveillance firms (Elbit Systems), and banks that invest in them, is essential to breaking the genocidal supply chain.⁵

• Organising workers: Labour must refuse to function as neutral in a genocidal economy. Dockworkers, for instance, have historically refused to unload apartheid cargo, as seen in the ILWU’s actions against South Africa and more recently Israel.⁶ Labour strikes, divestment campaigns, and walkouts can make the cost of genocide real to capital.

• Building dual power: Independent media, legal defence networks, mutual aid groups, and revolutionary political organisations are crucial to sustaining long-term opposition without dependence on hostile institutions. This mirrors Lenin's call for the creation of parallel organs of workers' power capable of challenging the capitalist state.⁷

• Internationalism: Anti-genocide organising in the West must be grounded in anti-imperialist internationalism, not humanitarian exceptionalism. As Frantz Fanon wrote, solidarity with the colonised is not a gesture of pity but a recognition of shared struggle against a common enemy: empire.⁸

The Strategic Necessity of Alienation

The fear of social and professional alienation keeps many of us silent or compromised. But Marxism reveals that alienation, when understood dialectically, can be generative. To be alienated from bourgeois society is to be freed from its ideological spell. Revolutionary transformation begins with clarity and clarity often begins in exile.

This strategic alienation is not about individual sacrifice for its own sake. It is about reorienting loyalty away from one's class position and toward the global working class and oppressed. As Lenin argued in What Is to Be Done?, the revolutionary must not wait for permission to tell the truth, they must provoke consciousness, rupture ideology, and be willing to stand outside the walls of legitimacy.⁹

To be cast out of a system that funds genocide is not a tragedy; it is a beginning.

There is no respectable way to oppose genocide. There is only resistance or complicity. In an age when children in Gaza are buried under rubble paid for by our tax dollars, liberal appeals to civility and “balanced discourse” are obscene. Our challenge, to reject bourgeois respectability and embrace revolutionary honesty is a demand that we reenter history. To do so is to risk expulsion, repression, and scorn. But to remain silent is to forfeit one’s humanity.

We must remember: it is not our task to be understood by the empire, but to end it.

Yours, warmly,

V.

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1. Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971. ↩

2. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Progress Publishers, 1976. ↩

3. Erakat, Noura. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford University Press, 2019. ↩

4. Luxemburg, Rosa. Reform or Revolution. 1900. Available via Marxists Internet Archive. ↩

5. Barghouti, Omar. Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Haymarket Books, 2011. ↩

6. International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), various statements and historical actions. See labor solidarity archives. ↩

7. Lenin, Vladimir. The State and Revolution. 1917. Available via Marxists Internet Archive. ↩

8. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963. ↩

9. Lenin, Vladimir. What Is to Be Done?. 1902. Available via Marxists Internet Archive. ↩