Mass commercial culture is produced for workers, not by workers

Evidence

Note that, in Part I , the term “working-class culture” seems to apply interchangeably to both the typical attitudes, values, and ways of life of working people in the prewar decades and the forms of publication, entertainment, and popular culture that circulated among them. As critics have pointed out, these had very different sources—the latter being produced, not by working-class people themselves but by the commercial classes for the working classes; and, as Raymond Williams noted in a very early review of The Uses of Literacy , “the equation of ‘working-class culture’ with the mass commercial culture which has increasingly dominated our century” produces damaging results (Williams 1957: 30). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 143

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Clarifies the conflation of ‘working-class culture’ with commercial mass culture in Hoggart’s text.
• XREF: Williams’s critique points to the producer/consumer distinction later central to Cultural Studies debates.

Related

• Working-class culture and commercial mass culture are distinct products made by different classes (similarity 0.97)
• Commercial mass culture was produced for, not by, the working classes. (similarity 0.91)
• Mass commercial media were changing older working-class attitudes and values. (similarity 0.80)
• Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy founded Cultural Studies. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Working-class culture emerges from its material conditions combined with class struggle #expands (0.60)