Working-class culture and commercial mass culture are distinct products made by different classes

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

• DEFINE: Clarifies a key conflation in Hoggart’s terminology: lived working-class culture vs. commercially produced culture aimed at the working class.
• XREF: Pairs with Raymond Williams’ concepts of culture and the Williams critique cited here; resonates with Frankfurt School claims that mass culture is produced by commercial classes.