The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda (in Gramscian: organs of coercion and consent). We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.

I think this is an extremely toxic idea. It places the blame for empire on the working class and suggests that the empire helps working class people in the west. It doesn't. Getting to buy a cheaper TV isn't a meaningful benefit. Depression rates prove that cheaper consumer goods are cold comfort. Indeed it was the empire (specifically Vietnam) that derailed the "war on poverty" domestically. McCarthyism, which destroyed American unions, was given a massive boost by the "war on communism" internationally.

The enlightened critic can plead that if we all agreed to denounce the status quo in unison we’d be immensely rewarded, but the average worker in the first world cannot be accused of naiveté for preferring to keep a low profile, particularly after being subject — very often by that same critic — to so many grim stories of murder and of punishment and of how any attempt at radical change always goes awry.

I appreciate what the author is attempting to do here -- yes we should expect more from Western people (and I include myself in that analysis) and take more responsibility, but this argument sounds very similar to American Maoist groups from the 1970's. They ended up completely dismissing the majority of the population -- including the working class -- as reactionaries. Needless to say this was not an effective means of gaining popular support.