The uses and values of literacy

Richard Hoggart, aesthetic standards, and the commodification of working-class culture

Bill Hughes

pp. 213-226

in: Sue Owen (ed), Richard Hoggart and cultural studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

In chapter 1 of Capital, Volume I, Karl Marx famously depicts the commodity — the dominant kind of things produced under capitalism — as a mysterious, irrational, and contradictory being. The contradiction is between use-value — deriving from the real, sensuous qualities of a thing and the use that human beings make of it — and exchange-value, an abstract quality that effaces the useful properties of things in order that they can be measured against a common standard for exchange.

Cited authors

Marx Karl

Hoggart Richard