Policies of qualitative production inevitably produce disqualified quantity and malnutrition

Evidence

One can further observe this: if a nation specialises in “qualitative” production, what industry provides the consumer goods for the poorer classes? Does this mean promoting a system of international division of labour? The whole thing is nothing more than a formula for idle men of letters and for politicians whose demagogy consists in building castles in the air. Quality should be attributed to men, not to things; and human quality is raised and refined to the extent that man can satisfy a greater number of needs and thus make himself independent of them. The high price of bread, due to a desire to keep a greater quantity of people tied to a specific activity, leads to malnutrition. A policy of quality almost always determines its opposite: dis-qualified quantity. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1136

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s dialectical inversion ‘a policy of quality almost always determines its opposite: dis-qualified quantity’ is a compact critical-theory mechanism well worth retaining.
• XREF: Connects to the ideological-rationalization mechanisms the reader will meet in later hegemony/common-sense readings: ‘quality’ talk masks class-specific production arrangements. — connects to: Peasants in postwar Italy reorganized production around subsistence needs rather than profit — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 381