The ‘West’ or ‘Western World’ continues to be a contested conceptualisation, temporalised and impregnated with the history of uncivilised wars and territorialised in the form of countries in Western Europe, North America and Australasia, which falsely claim a cultural unity based on Christianity, colonial modernity and racialised capitalist and colonial progress with limited democracy—four core values of othering and the foundation of white supremacist ruling ideology in the contemporary Western world.
Racist bigots in politics, journalism and academia, along with reactionary commentators and half-baked right-wing intellectuals, peddle white supremacist ideology in the name of protecting Western values and society. They do so by promoting a restless, concocted and reactionary nationalist campaign across the Western world that advances ideas such as ‘the West is falling’, ‘the West is in Crisis’ or ‘the crisis of the West’, ‘threat to Western values’, ‘death of the West’, ‘failed West’, ‘liberal West’, ‘too soft west’, ‘saving the West and Western values’, ‘death of Europe’, ‘Muslim and migrant invasion’, ‘boat invaders’, ‘the great replacement’, ‘historical shift’ and ‘London is a foreign country’, etc.
Therefore, flag-waving reactionary and right wing political campaigns calling for ‘Making Britain Great Again’, ‘Making America Great Again’, ‘Europe for Europeans’, ‘Restore Europe’ and ‘Reform Britain’ are in full swing, while people in the Western world are struggling with various forms of crisis, from rising youth unemployment to child poverty, and from homelessness to debt and destitution due to the rising cost-of-living crisis. The political leadership, instead of providing solutions to these problems, outsources them by othering the non-white population in the West. Political leaders from Trump to Meloni and Nigel Farage, and corporate trillionaires like Elon Musk, spread the messages of these campaigns on an everyday basis.
But who is responsible for the fall of the West? Muslims and migrants are not responsible. They work in hospitals as doctors and nurses; sustain public transportation as bus, train and taxi drivers; work as school teachers, college lecturers and university professors. Migrants work in care homes, hotels, hospitals and educational institutions as cooks and cleaners; they pay their taxes and bills and sustain local, regional and national economies. Migrants from different parts of the world work as engineers, researchers, bankers and consultants to sustain public infrastructure and the private mobility of capital. Migrants work as workers and managers in supermarkets. Migrants run libraries, coffee shops and airports. All bed-and-breakfasts would shut down in the West without migrant workers. The West can’t survive a day without depending on the labour, skills, knowledge and creativity of migrant workers, who come from all religious, national and racial backgrounds, forming a social rainbow of a multicultural and multiethnic society in the West.
However, despite all their contributions, migrants are demonised on an everyday basis as welfare scroungers and a threat to so-called Western values—a contested and philosophically unfounded expression. So, who is responsible for the fall of the West? It is not migrants, people of colour and white working people. It is the bourgeois ruling classes and elites in the West, whose wealth comes from slavery and who therefore promote modern slavery in different forms of capitalism and exploit people and the planet on a daily basis. These governing elites promote policies that transfer wealth from working people to their secure tax havens. They promote policies for quick profit by shutting down sources of livelihood, employment and income for working people, who can then be used as a reserve army of low-paid workers defined by national minimum wages, while the superrich enjoy unlimited wealth at their disposal for leisure and pleasure.
Migrants did not destroy Western European unity, but undemocratic European Commission created conditions for referendum in Britain to exit united Brussels. Migrants did not close down the industries, factories, hospitals, train stations, mines, council housing, public parks, playgrounds, schools and universities. The Western ruling elites, with their shopkeeper mindset of making quick profit, decided to shut down the economic engines of growth based on employment and replace them with jobless growth, generating unemployment, poverty and homelessness. Migrants suffer like anyone else in the West, while ruling and non-ruling elites enjoy their lives in leisure and pleasure.
The failed ruling classes in Western world outsource their failures to migrants, who face relentless racist discrimination in offices, violence in the streets and abuse in police stations because of the anti-migrant and racist propaganda spread by reactionary, right-wing politicians and their media and other mouthpieces of power, privilege and plunder. These forces plunder public resources at the cost of working people and create propaganda that turns working people against one another, undermining their own unity and interests. These strategies of the ruling classes are not confined to the West; they are a worldwide phenomenon aimed at weakening the united struggle of the working class and its empowerment and emancipation.
The plunderous, racist, colonial, imperialist and capitalist ruling classes, their ideologies and 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 Western ruling classes are the real scroungers; they survive on the blood, sweat, creativity and labour of working people. Blaming migrants, the working classes, the poor and the vulnerable is not an alternative. The only alternative is to start a united struggle against the ruling classes and their racist, white supremacist ideology and capitalist system which is responsible for the fall of the West and many other sufferings in the world. Working class unity and solidarity can not only revive the West but also provide the path of peace, prosperity and progress of people across the world.
