Just as sunlight on a sunny morning isn’t experienced as separated wavelengths and colors, we don’t live our lives as beings split into economic, cultural and political parts. For those of us working primarily with and through culture, how does this shape our work?
In 1944, the anticolonial surrealist, writer and politician Aimé Césaire argued for the importance of “poetic knowledge” in decolonization efforts. I first encountered this idea via Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams, where Kelley further explains that the poetic knowledge we can tap into as creative, culture-centered people focused on collective liberation is not simply about writing poems. Instead, this poetic knowledge is the vital practice of tending to experience as a whole. I interpret this as a rejection of the separation of the cultural, political and economic spheres of life. Achieving a radical cultural transition requires more porous, intentional and disciplined practice that encompasses the historical and present-day interaction between the cultural, political, and economic spheres.
When I was seventeen, I travelled to Havana with a group of youth dancers, poets, actors, and visual artists. There is one conversation—about freedom—that has stuck with me ever since. Not wanting the wool pulled over my eyes, I was pushing a Cuban travelling companion on the question of freedom—specifically about what I had heard to be a lack of freedom of speech. He responded to my argument; “What does freedom mean to you? Is freedom having housing guaranteed and free education and free art classes for whoever wants them? Does it mean having food even if no one has too much? Or is it going to the grocery store and being able to choose between twenty different kinds of cereal?”
What I experienced coming home from that trip wasn’t a utopian sense of Cuba, but an acute realization that the culture I lived in and my personal worldview was shaped by the political and economic systems. The political and economic system shape how people spend their time, what we value, and how we are together. In a chicken-and-egg story, those systems were likewise shaped by cultural worldviews and histories. In Cuba, this included a revolutionary political ideology, but also a longer history of place, colonization, migration, religion, ecology and more. This experience made it abundantly clear that the same was also true in California. The political and economic systems that shaped the Bay Area were born from and creating culture where I lived; the class and race-based filtering of who lived where, the emphasis on individual achievement and competition, or the disruptive countercultural ethos that would usher in the tech revolution.
Many years later I’d see this analysis show up in the thinking of people concerned with culture and social change. Here are three framings of culture that I return to frequently and that resonate with this experience:
During an unpublished interview with Complex Movements in 2020, Sage Crump said, “Culture is made through people’s negotiation of the material conditions of their lives.”
Clifford Geertz: “Society’s forms are culture’s substance.”
Movement Generation: “There must also be a culture/worldview that makes the economy make sense to the people who participate in it, and that sets the limits of what is acceptable and what is not. In fact, that culture and worldview—the languages, stories, practices, rituals—evolve in dynamic relationship with all the other pillars [natural resources, work, governance, and purpose].”
Simply put, if culture is, as Sage has also said, “how we be together,” how we relate is shaped, constrained, and facilitated by basic physics: time (how we spend it, how much control we have of it) and space (where/how/in what conditions we interact). These are variables controlled and set by economic and political systems, as well as cultural worldviews and the longer residue of history. For example, for most people, how we secure housing is a function of how we spend our time (working, charging rent, making others work, etc.). Similarly, who we interact with and how is a residue of things both historical and present, like segregation (political), redlining (economic), and mortgage lending.
The broader movement around land—including land back, solidarity economic models, social housing, regenerative agriculture, etc.—is a powerful example of this in action. Economically, many land justice efforts integrate a redistributive or solidarity economy approach to one of the greatest sources of wealth under capitalism. They frequently practice new politics of governance while staying engaged in the dominant policy sphere out of necessity. As places, they create new space and time for how we relate. They are engines—or gardens—of generative culture, complete with slugs, failed crops, hard work, and bounty.
The entanglement of culture, politics, and economics arrives at my front door as well. Two different cultures stem from how economics and politics shape the time and space of United States Postal Service and Amazon delivery workers. Until he retired, I knew my postal worker. We’d trade fruit and stories, I knew about his trips to Vietnam, that his daughter was working in design, that his wife loves karaoke. He knew the names of everyone on our block and had a set route. I noticed when he had to take weeks off for a knee injury, and he noticed when we were travelling. He was able to retire.
I am kindly to the Amazon drivers—especially the woman who plays loud country music and rap alternately—but there is no time for any relation. There is no consistency or rhythm to our appearance in each other’s lives, driven instead by the purchasing habits of neighbors. The drivers are always rushed. We can trace the way this shapes culture further; the labor impacts on “associates” in Amazon factories with no time to be with their families or friends, the geopolitical negotiations that facilitate the rapid transport of goods or fossil fuels for plastics, or the intentional underselling that torpedoes smaller producers.
Challenges to Tending Experience as a Whole
To tend to “experience as a whole” within social movements, we need infrastructure, belief and practices that cross the economic, political, and cultural spheres. Part of this is rooted in how we—as practitioners—might be limiting our own imagination, skills, and resourcefulness. The border policing of expertise in economics and politics is forceful and intimidating. But as social movement creatives and cultural workers, we might actually have more to pull from. As dream hampton reflected to Sage Crump during the early onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “When governments fail, facilitation becomes governance.” And as a wise person—whose name I unfortunately cannot remember—shared in another gathering about economic justice for creative workers, the myth about artists being bad with money is frustratingly inaccurate. We are always stretching small grants and payments into something larger. Depending on your cultural worldview, it is the people with immense wealth lying around and serving no life-affirming purpose that are, in fact, bad with money.
Experience as a Whole also requires expanded and flexible support for working in porous and integrated ways. For example, liberal funders frequently have siloed program areas where arts and culture, economics, and politics are structurally blocked from collaborating with each other. Many attempts to advance equity, justice, and cultures of belonging are limited to narratives, symbols, and ideas, without practice-based alternatives to the hypercompetitive, exploitative consumerist and anti-public culture we swim in. A reticence to create opportunities for practicing and iterating around these ideas, as well as a reticence to name alternatives—socialism, solidarity economics, and deep democracy, for example—leaves cultural power building on its own island, too often yelling into the wind.
The right has fewer qualms about the ways these spheres interact. It isn’t that the right is winning the culture war, it’s that capitalist expansion and reactionary politics are winning as a cultural strategy. For example, a 2025 report reviewing online media shows revealed that nine out of the top ten online media shows are right-leaning with over a third self-identifying as nonpolitical. It may be that young, right-leaning men are prime for this media form—many of these popular shows explicitly focus on victimization of American men—but this dominance does not come out of thin air. Conservatives have funded and built infrastructure with what appears to be little hesitation about the distinction between culture, politics, and economics.
As somebody trying to shift culture, it can suddenly be overwhelming to keep all that in the frame. Are we supposed to change all of that? There is also a significant power imbalance—the wealthy and politically powerful are overwhelmingly invested in continuing the system that serves them. In spaces of asymmetrical power, cultural production, intervention, and practice can and frequently does punch above its weight. But if we continue to ask people to shift cultural practices, norms, and values without, as organizer and poet Aniya Butler shared with me, providing the material infrastructure to back that, we won’t build lasting cultural power and social transformation. Without intentional strategy that looks at the enmeshment of culture, politics, and economics, we are asking people to shift culture through what is akin to an individualized behavioral plan. From public health research, we know that this is one of the least effective ways to shape change. We also know from public health that population level shifts—and individual behavior changes—are most effective when there are economic, political, and cultural interventions at multiple scales, and when people feel in control of their own ability to shape their future.
From Culture as Catalyst to Experience as a Whole
Over the past two decades, there has been a proliferation of toolkits, frameworks and best practices for how culture can be more effectively leveraged in progressive and left social change efforts. Influential in my own work and more broadly, The Culture Group provided a theory of change to organize around, resulting in increased resources for narrative strategy, culture jamming, and pop culture storytelling and interventions.
