The word quality in production means labour-heavy luxury specialization

Evidence

In the world of production these words mean nothing more than “inexpensive” and “expensive”—i.e. satisfaction or failure to satisfy the basic needs of the popular classes and a tendency respectively to raise or to lower their standard of living. All the rest is just an ideological serial story … In a nation-enterprise which has at its disposal a large labour force and a small amount of raw materials (which is a dubious hypothesis, since every nation-enterprise can “create” its own raw materials) the term “quality” simply means the intention of employing a lot of labour on a little material, perfecting the product to the maximum. In other words, it means specialisation for a luxury market. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1133

Categorization

• XREF: This materialist decoding of ‘quality’ prefigures how critical theory strips ideological terms to reveal class content — directly transferable to decoding ‘civilization’, ‘values’ etc. in Islamophobia discourse.
• QUESTION: The parenthetical claim that every nation-enterprise can ‘create’ its own raw materials is intriguing and unexplained here — worth chasing down Gramsci’s fuller account.