A defeated coercive labour policy can reappear later under a new economic program.

Evidence

The policy was implicitly defeated, with the rejection of the Trotsky Bukharin theses on the Trades Unions, at the Xth Congress in 1921. The adoption of the New Economic Policy rendered the methods of War Communism redundant. However, it has been argued that a close resemblance can be found between the “militarisation of labour” and the labour policy of the period of the Five Year Plans. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2433

Categorization

• XREF: Connects forward to the toolkit’s genealogy and biopolitics strand: how a dispositif is discredited rhetorically yet returns in reconfigured institutional form.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Defeated but Not Dead’ — tracing how rejected coercive labour doctrines resurface attached to productivity or emergency rhetoric.