The “West” remains a contested idea. It is often used to describe Western Europe, North America and Australasia as if they shared one culture built on Christianity, colonial modernity and racialised capitalist progress. In reality, this claimed unity has too often rested on othering, limited democracy and a white supremacist ruling ideology.
Racist bigots in politics, journalism and academia, along with reactionary commentators and half-baked right-wing intellectuals, now peddle white supremacy in the name of defending Western values. They speak constantly of a “falling West,” a “crisis of the West,” a “death of Europe,” a “Muslim invasion,” “boat invaders,” “the great replacement” and London becoming “a foreign country.” These are not neutral descriptions. They are campaign slogans.
That is why flag-waving movements such as “Make Britain Great Again,” “Make America Great Again,” “Europe for Europeans,” “Restore Europe” and “Reform Britain” are in full swing while ordinary people face youth unemployment, child poverty, homelessness, debt and the rising cost of living. Instead of solving these problems, political leaders from Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni and Nigel Farage, amplified by corporate billionaires such as Elon Musk, outsource blame to non-white people.
But migrants are not responsible for the fall of the West. They work in hospitals as doctors and nurses. They drive buses, trains and taxis. They teach in schools, colleges and universities. They cook and clean in care homes, hotels, hospitals and schools. They pay taxes and bills. They sustain local, regional and national economies as engineers, researchers, bankers, consultants, supermarket workers and managers. They run libraries, coffee shops, airports and bed-and-breakfasts. The West could not survive a single day without the labour, skill, knowledge and creativity of migrant workers from every religion, nation and race.
Yet these same people are demonised daily as welfare scroungers and threats to so-called Western values. So who is responsible? Not migrants, not people of colour and not white working people. The responsibility lies with the bourgeois ruling classes and elites whose wealth was built through slavery and who now sustain modern forms of exploitation under capitalism. They design policies that move wealth from working people into secure tax havens. They pursue quick profit by closing factories, mines, hospitals, rail services, council housing, public parks, playgrounds, schools and universities. They replace employment-led growth with jobless growth, then keep workers desperate as a low-paid reserve army while the super-rich enjoy unlimited wealth.
Migrants did not destroy European unity. The undemocratic structures of the European Commission helped create the conditions for Britain’s referendum and exit from Brussels. Migrants did not shut down the economic engines of growth. Western ruling elites did that with a shopkeeper mentality obsessed with short-term gain. Migrants suffer like everyone else, while ruling and non-ruling elites continue to live in leisure and pleasure.
The failed ruling classes of the West outsource their failures to migrants, who then face racist discrimination in offices, violence in the streets and abuse in police stations. This hatred is fed by right-wing politicians and media outlets that serve power, privilege and plunder. They loot public resources at the expense of working people, then turn workers against one another to weaken unity and struggle. These tactics are not unique to the West; they are used across the world to block working-class empowerment and emancipation.
The plunderous, racist, colonial, imperialist and capitalist ruling classes, their ideologies and their policies are responsible for the fall of the West. It is time to expose authoritarian ruling-class propaganda and the exploitative political, economic and policy regimes that survive by exploiting people and nature. The real scroungers are the Western ruling classes, who live on the blood, sweat, creativity and labour of working people.
Blaming migrants, the working class, the poor and the vulnerable is not an alternative. The only way forward is a united struggle against the ruling classes, their racist and white supremacist ideology, and the capitalist system responsible for the fall of the West and for much suffering across the world. Working-class unity and solidarity can revive the West and show the path to peace, prosperity and progress for people everywhere.
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*Academic based in UK
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