Trotsky framed state labour control as union-enforced military discipline
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
- DEFINE: Trotsky’s own articulation of what ‘militarisation of labour’ meant — the core definitional content of this policy concept.
- XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s biopolitics/necropolitics theme — the state converting the worker body into a regulated resource — and to later readings on how bureaucratic-rational coercion is legitimated. — connects to: State control of labor made capitalist surplus extraction explicitly political during the war — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 186