The mass commercial press absorbed and contained working-class radical culture after destroying it

Evidence

To go back to displacement and superimposition—we can see clearly how the liberal middle-class press of the mid-nineteenth century was constructed on the back of the active destruction and marginalization of the indigenous radical and working-class press. But, on top of that process, something qualitatively new occurs toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in this area: the active, mass insertion of a developed and mature working-class audience into a new kind of popular , commercial press. This has had profound cultural consequences: though it isn’t in any narrow sense exclusively a “cultural” question at all. It required the whole reorganization of the capital basis and structure of the cultural industry; a harnessing of new forms of technology and of labor processes; the establishment of new types of distribution, operating through the new cultural mass markets. But one of its effects was indeed a reconstituting of the cultural and political relations between the dominant and the dominated classes: a change intimately connected with that containment of popular democracy on which “our democratic way of life” today appears to be so securely based. Its results are all too palpably with us still, today: a popular press, the more strident and virulent as it gradually shrinks; organized by capital “for” the working classes; with, nevertheless, deep and influential roots in the culture and language of the “underdog,” of “Us”: with the power to represent the class to itself in its most traditionalist form. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 998

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony concept and to how the culture industry appropriates oppositional energies — echoes material on Frankfurt School’s culture industry critique.
• SEED: An essay angle: the tabloid press today as ‘organized by capital for the working classes’ — tracing how a public sphere built on contained popular democracy now speaks in the traditionalist voice of ‘Us.’
• DEFINE: Hall demonstrates displacement and superimposition concretely here: how new cultural forms accrete on the ruins of the old ones they displaced.