Notable and Quotable

"Put simply, the current Marxist case is as follows: because the production of culture is subject to the laws of the capitalist economy, cultural products are degraded into commodities to make as much profit as possible on the market. The exchange value of those products is therefore essential for the producers, leading to a neglect of quality. The capitalist market economy is only interested in the production of surplus value and as such is indifferent to the specific characteristics of the goods: caring only that they are sold and consumed. Mass culture is the extreme embodiment of the subjection of culture to the economy; its most important characteristic is that it provides profit for the production.
But this is a one-sided presentation of the case. Marx himself stated that "a commodity only has exchange value in so far as it is at the same time a use-value, i.e. as an object of consumption, it ceases to have an exchange value if it ceases to have a use-value." In other words, one cannot succeed in selling a commodity if it does not have a certain usefulness. And it is here that the contradictory character of the capitalist mode of production lies. From the standpoint of production the product only features as a commodity, but from the standpoint of consumption the same product features as a use-value."
- Ien Ang (1985: 18) on the recent rethinking of cultural consumption in Marxist theory (quoted in Goodwin, 1992: 43-44)