Trotsky’s program to industrialize through external coercion was destined to end in Bonapartism

Evidence

Its essential content, from this point of view, consisted in an “over”-resolute (and therefore not rationalised) will to give supremacy in national life to industry and industrial methods, to accelerate, through coercion imposed from the outside, the growth of discipline and order in production, and to adapt customs to the necessities of work. Given the general way in which all the problems connected with this tendency were conceived, it was destined necessarily to end up in a form of Bonapartism. Hence the inexorable necessity of crushing it. The preoccupations were correct, but the practical solutions were profoundly mistaken, and in this imbalance between theory and practice there was an inherent danger—the same danger, incidentally, which had manifested itself earlier, in 1921. The principle of coercion, direct or indirect, in the ordering of production and work, is correct: but the form which it assumed was mistaken. The military model had become a pernicious prejudice and the militarisation of labour was a failure. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1116

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s diagnosis that externally imposed discipline (rather than hegemony) degenerates into Bonapartism parallels the Frankfurt readings on authoritarian state power.
• QUESTION: The distinction Gramsci draws between correct coercion-in-production in principle and its mistaken military form deserves unpacking — what would non-militarized coercion look like?