This is such an important point, which I want to relate to an important intra-left debate about Liberalism and Fascism.

Liberalism uses the figure of The Market to naturalize an arbitrary list of things that *capitalists* want to produce, as objectively socially necessary. 1/ https://twitter.com/maxsussman/status/1342594168204505091

And so once you have arbitrarily decided what's necessary to produce, you have an artificial benchmark to say whose labor is "skilled" and whose labor is only fit for "makework." Who is contributing to the economy and who is a cost to it.

2/

And contrary to what I think some Marxists would say about Fascism—that it's a historically specific and especially racist form of capitalism—we would suggest that Fascism is a fully self-aware Liberalism. Fascism *consciously* divides the world into Das Volk and Other...

3/

based on an arbitrary list of goods and services that its leaders have determined to be socially necessary for "Das Volk"--white, traditional, nuclear families.

While Liberalism, on the other hand, is VeRy SaD that this is only sometimes necessary because of The Market.

4/

And this is why we (Superstructure) insist that reducing politics to a zero-sum distributional conflict over a fixed amount of money or fixed set of "universal" goods is a long term problem. It's not that I think Liberalism=Fascism. It's about how one conditions the other.

5/