Total labour mobilization requires unions to become organs of coercion over workers.

Evidence

“Militarisation is unthinkable without the militarisation of the Trades Unions as such, without the establishment of a regime in. which every worker feels himself a soldier of labour, who cannot dispose of himself freely; if the order is given to transfer him, he must carry it out; if he does not carry it out, he will be a deserter who is punished. Who looks after this? The Trade Union. It creates the new regime. This is the militarisation of the working class.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2432

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s other discussions of Taylorism and Fordism give the capitalist analogue; this is the state-socialist version of disciplining the body of the worker, useful for the toolkit’s account of how bureaucratic rationality organizes labour.
• DEFINE: Supplies a first-person definition of ‘militarisation of labour’ as a condition in which every worker is a soldier who cannot dispose of himself freely.
• SEED: Angle: ‘The Soldier of Labour’ — how the metaphor of the deserter turns ordinary labour mobility into a punishable crime, and how modern states revive it under other names.