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By Tarique Ahmed
Culture is often treated as something we inherit: a language spoken by our grandparents, food prepared in our homes, festivals celebrated by our communities, or customs passed from one generation to another. But culture is more than tradition. It is a living social process through which people make meaning, negotiate identities, reproduce relationships and contest power.
In a world shaped by migration, globalisation and digital communication, culture cannot be understood as something fixed or contained within national borders. More importantly, culture cannot be separated from the material conditions in which people live. Who has access to education, media, technology and cultural institutions? Who produces films, newspapers, music and literature? Who owns the platforms through which culture circulates? And whose experiences are treated as representative of society? These are not merely cultural questions. They are also questions of class and power.
This is where Raymond Williams and the socialist tradition of Cultural Studies become particularly important.
From the “Complex Whole” to the Social Production of Culture
One of the earliest and most influential attempts to define culture came from the British anthropologist E. B. Tylor. In Primitive Culture, published in 1871, Tylor described culture as a “complex whole” encompassing knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and other capabilities acquired by human beings as members of society.
Tylor’s definition was significant because it expanded culture beyond the narrow understanding of art or intellectual achievement. Culture included everyday social life. Yet his evolutionary framework also reflected the intellectual assumptions of nineteenth-century anthropology. Societies were often placed along a hierarchy that imagined movement from the “primitive” towards the “civilised”. Later anthropologists challenged this model.
Franz Boas argued that cultures needed to be understood within their particular historical and social contexts rather than placed on a single ladder of development. Bronislaw Malinowski examined the functions cultural institutions performed within particular societies. Clifford Geertz later emphasised culture as a system of meanings through which people interpret their world. These approaches demonstrate that culture has never had a single definition. It has been understood as practice, meaning, institution, belief and social organisation.
But there is another question that becomes unavoidable once culture is viewed as part of everyday life: who has the power to produce and define culture? That question takes us directly to Raymond Williams.
Raymond Williams and the Radical Meaning of “Culture Is Ordinary”
Williams’s intervention was important precisely because he challenged the assumption that culture belongs primarily to educated elites. His famous assertion that “culture is ordinary” was more than a statement about everyday habits. It was a political argument. For Williams, culture was created through ordinary people’s lived experiences. It existed in language, family life, work, education, entertainment, community relationships and collective struggles. Culture was not something handed down from cultural institutions to passive populations. It was continuously made and remade by society itself.
This perspective has a distinctly socialist dimension. If culture is ordinary, then the cultural experiences of workers, migrants, women, marginalised communities and working-class families cannot be treated as inferior versions of an elite culture. Their language, music, stories, memories and forms of social organisation are themselves cultural productions. Williams therefore helps us move away from the question, “What is culture?” towards a more political question: “Who gets to define culture?” That distinction matters.
A society may celebrate the literature of its elite while ignoring the songs of its workers. It may preserve monuments while forgetting the people who built them. It may celebrate a city’s cosmopolitan identity while treating migrant workers as outsiders. It may consume the food and music of migrant communities while simultaneously discriminating against the people who brought those cultural practices into public life. Culture, therefore, is deeply connected to inequality.
Culture, Class and Material Life
A socialist understanding of culture begins with a simple recognition: people create culture within particular material conditions. Someone working twelve hours a day, living in insecure housing and struggling to survive experiences culture differently from someone with economic security and institutional power. This does not mean that economic circumstances mechanically determine culture. Williams himself resisted simplistic economic determinism. Instead, culture and society exist in a relationship: economic structures influence cultural life, while cultural practices can also challenge and reshape social relationships.
This is one of the most important contributions of Cultural Studies. Capitalism does not simply produce commodities. It also produces cultural environments. Advertising tells people what they should desire. Entertainment industries determine which stories receive investment. Media organisations influence which voices become visible. Digital platforms transform attention into profit. Cultural products increasingly circulate through corporations whose primary objective is accumulation. Yet people are not simply passive consumers.
They interpret, adapt and sometimes resist dominant cultural meanings. A popular song can acquire a political meaning different from the intention of its producer. A social-media platform designed for commercial engagement can become a space for protest. A migrant community can transform an unfamiliar neighbourhood through its food, language, religious practices and social networks.
Culture is therefore a site of struggle.
Migration and the Culture of Labour
Migration makes this relationship between culture and material life particularly visible. Migration is often discussed through the language of borders, employment, remittances and demographic change. But migrants do not move only as economic units. They carry memories, languages, recipes, music, religious practices, clothing, stories and forms of social organisation. At the same time, migration is frequently inseparable from labour. People migrate because of economic inequalities, political instability, conflict, employment opportunities and uneven development. Their movement is therefore connected to the global organisation of labour.
A migrant worker may build a city without being fully accepted as part of its cultural identity. They may construct houses in which they will never live, prepare food that becomes fashionable while remaining economically precarious, or provide services that sustain urban life while their own cultural histories remain invisible. This reveals an important contradiction. Modern cities often celebrate multiculturalism while obscuring the class relations that make multicultural urban life possible.
The restaurant worker, construction labourer, domestic worker, delivery rider or factory worker may contribute directly to a city’s cultural life while remaining economically marginalised within it.
A socialist Cultural Studies approach forces us to ask not only what cultural diversity looks like, but who performs the labour that sustains it.
Culture Travels, But So Does Power
Migration also demonstrates why cultures cannot be understood as sealed national containers.
Food, language, music and literature have always travelled. The cultural history of the Arab world, for example, cannot be separated from centuries of movement and interaction across Africa, the Mediterranean, Persia, Central Asia and South Asia. Languages developed through contact. Ideas travelled with merchants, scholars, travellers and migrants. Literature, architecture, science and cuisine were transformed through these encounters. The same process continues today at a much greater speed.
A young person may speak a regional language at home, watch Korean dramas, listen to American music, study Arabic literature and communicate through global digital platforms. Such combinations are not necessarily evidence of cultural confusion. They are evidence of cultural production.
But global cultural exchange is not always equal. Some cultures have greater access to global media markets than others. Some languages receive enormous institutional investment while others struggle for visibility. Some communities can turn their cultural practices into profitable global commodities, while the communities themselves remain economically disadvantaged. This is where class, capitalism and cultural power intersect.
The question is not simply whether cultures meet. It is under what conditions they meet.
The contemporary cultural economy makes this question even more urgent. A film, song, book or social-media post may appear to be an individual act of creativity, but cultural production increasingly takes place within large commercial systems. Streaming companies determine what audiences encounter. Social-media algorithms determine what becomes visible. Advertising transforms identities and lifestyles into commodities. Culture is therefore simultaneously a form of expression and an economic resource.
This does not mean that every cultural practice is controlled by capitalism. Nor does it mean that audiences are helpless. Rather, it reminds us that cultural production occurs within structures of ownership, labour and unequal access. Williams’s approach remains valuable precisely because it allows us to hold these tensions together. Culture is produced within material conditions, but people are not reducible to those conditions. They actively create meanings, identities and forms of resistance. Culture is both structured and lived.
Cultural Studies as a Politics of the Everyday
This is why Cultural Studies remains important. Its value lies not simply in studying television, literature, music or social media. Its deeper contribution is showing that everyday life is political.
The language we use can reproduce hierarchy or challenge it. Media representation can reinforce stereotypes or undermine them. Popular culture can normalise inequality or expose it. Migrant communities can be represented as outsiders, or their experiences can become part of the national story. Cultural Studies asks us to pay attention to these struggles because power does not operate only through governments and laws. It also operates through meanings.
What is considered respectable? What is considered modern? Whose accent is mocked? Whose history is remembered? Whose literature is taught? Whose food becomes fashionable? Whose suffering becomes visible? And whose labour remains invisible?
These questions reveal that culture is never politically neutral.
Culture Is Ordinary and Therefore Political
The enduring significance of Williams’s argument is that culture belongs to ordinary people.
This is particularly important in a migrating world. Migrants do not simply enter existing cultures; they participate in changing them. Workers do not merely consume culture; they produce it. Young people do not simply inherit traditions; they reinterpret them. Culture is therefore neither a museum object nor a possession of elites.
It is a process.
