Popular culture in industrial societies is contradictory to its core. On the one hand it is industrialized - its commodities produced and distributed by a profit-motivated industry that follows only its own economic interests. But on the other hand, it is of the people, and the people's interests are not those of the industry - as is evidenced by the number of films, records and other products that the people make into expensive failures. To be incorporated into popular culture, a commodity must also bear the interests of the people. Popular culture is not consumption, it is culture - the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system: culture, however industrialized, can never be adequately described in terms of the buying and selling of commodities. Culture is a living, active process: it can be developed only from within, it cannot be imposed from without or above. The fears of the mass culture theorists have not been borne out in practice because mass culture is such a contradiction in terms that it cannot exist.