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(2008) Richard Hoggart and cultural studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

The uses and values of literacy

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

Bill Hughes

pp. 213-226

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.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1057/9780230583313_14

Full citation:

Hughes, B. (2008)., The uses and values of literacy: Richard Hoggart, aesthetic standards, and the commodification of working-class culture, in S. Owen (ed.), Richard Hoggart and cultural studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 213-226.

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