Culture, Society, and the Beautiful Necessity of Democratic Workers Unions
In an epoch defined by industrialization, technological change, and the relentless pursuit of private gain, the philosophical distinction between culture and society has grown dangerously blurred. This oversight weakens society’s ability to safeguard democratic freedoms and places cultural autonomy in peril. At stake is the vitality of our public life and the possibility of building a political future where people can meet, speak, and act together as equals.
To restore this possibility, we must understand a third force that connects culture and society in practice: democratic workers’ unions. When grounded in the lived, embodied spaces where people labor and meet, these unions act as a hinge between the shared traditions of culture and the structured guarantees of society.
Hannah Arendt and the Space Between
Hannah Arendt, a political theorist who became regarded as “the first woman philosopher of Western thought” in post-World War II Germany, devoted her life to clarifying the relationship between human freedom and political action. As a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and arrived in the United States in 1941, she witnessed firsthand what happens when the bridges between culture and society collapse under totalitarian pressure.
Arendt’s thinking on natality (the fact that each of us is born into the world as a new beginning) and plurality (the fact that our differences are the basis of our shared humanity) was rooted in the tension and mutual dependence between culture and society. For her:
Culture is the inheritance of shared beliefs, practices, and values—handed down through time—that give people a sense of identity and meaning.
Society is the structured space of appearance where those cultural forms can flourish within stable frameworks—laws, institutions, and systems of exchange.
Arendt’s insight is that while culture and society are distinct, they require each other. When they drift too far apart, both are exposed to domination—whether by the mob, the market, or the machinery of the state.
Sociality as Living Connection
In this framework, democratic workers’ unions—organized expressions of working-class solidarity—become the essential third force. They are not merely tools for economic negotiation; they are living structures that protect both the cultural identity of their members and the societal guarantees necessary for democracy.
As cultural actors, unions draw on the shared histories, rituals, and solidarities of the communities they represent.
As social actors, they negotiate with employers, engage the state, and demand material conditions that enable people to live with dignity.
As democratic actors, they occupy the embodied, real-life spaces—the shop floor, the meeting hall, the picket line—where people can act together, speak together, and see each other as equals.
When unions thrive, they preserve the conditions under which culture can resist being hollowed out for profit, and society can resist becoming an impersonal machinery for production and control.
The Threat of Techno-Society
Without such a mediating force, culture is left to navigate the labyrinth of an extractive techno-society—a social order that values data, efficiency, and profit over human meaning. In this environment, cultural traditions, which require the slow passage of time to develop and renew, are forced to compete with the speed and scale of industrial and digital production.
Money, in this context, becomes a revealing measure. For working people, particularly in the Southern United States, money is a means to secure material goods and access cultural life—sports, music, rituals of community. For the oligarchs of techno-society, money becomes a tool for turning culture into a commodity, stripping it of its rootedness and rebranding it for private gain. This is cultural appropriation in its purest form: the reduction of lived tradition into consumable symbol.
Cultural identity is inherited—it carries the weight of history and tradition. Social identity, by contrast, is chosen and affirmed through participation in public life. The two are linked in the space of appearance—the places where people are seen, heard, and recognized by others.
Paid work is one such space. Workers bring their cultural identity into socially structured environments, making themselves visible to both culture and society. When workers organize democratically, they create a crucible where cultural diversity and social equality meet, forging a shared purpose: the defense of material well-being and the cultivation of public freedom.
A democracy that wishes to remain free must hold open these embodied spaces. Culture must value society’s protections as the condition for its survival; society must value culture’s rootedness as the source of its legitimacy. Unions—democratic, participatory, grounded in real places—are the practice that binds them.
The human spirit can thrive in both realms. But without a framework for public, unified, collective action—without people consciously choosing to inhabit the gap between culture and society—the fragile connection between them risks being lost.
The flame of the Revolutionary American Spirit is fanned by the belief that all people are created equal. This truth is not only a legal claim but a cultural one, reaffirmed when we stand together in public with neighbors, fellow workers, and people of good will, refusing domination in any form.
