According to Marx in Capital, the idling of machines reduces profits in only two ways, since wages have already been paid while work cannot go on or while investment in fixed capital has produced the most efficient production methods. In every other case, idling old machines would increase profits as would idling machines in order to starve the workers so that when they returned they would accept lower wages.

To argue that destroying or idling machines improves the conditions of the workers ignores two obvious facts. One, that Marxists stand opposed to the Luddites who would destroy the machines to prevent their use with labor. Two, the shutting down of machines would reduce the wages paid to the workers as well as their purchasing power, since fewer goods would be produced while they could not claim wages. The Luddite WSWS position cannot remain in place. It protects and provokes the capitalist class to engage in its own reverse-Luddite violence against the workers.

In fact, the capitalists could easily shut down machines and increase their profits. This happens regularly in the form of shutdowns during labor disputes. If the workers don’t accept lower wages, the employer shuts down the factory, reduces wages to zero, and waits for them to give up and return at the lower rate.

The fact remains, then, that the capitalists do not want to use the pandemic to increase their profits. They instead plan to cause immense harm to the workers through the deliberate exposure of the people to the virus. This would facilitate the use of increasingly open violence to further the counter-revolution’s strategy against rising revolutionary sentiment, evidenced by the growth in popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Occasio-Cortez as well as the World Socialist Website. To combat counter-revolutionary violence requires first the acceptance of its existence and its receiving both secretive and open support from within the state.

The WSWS seems to agree with Malthus and his cothinkers, who Marx excoriated for substituting abstinence for Capital. As if Capital only comes from the abstinence of the capitalist class. This absurd view will push the WSWS into defending capitalists for their abstinence and then capitalism for its insurmountable strength and morality. The capitalists do not gain more profit from abstaining to consume but rather from extracting the most surplus value from the workers. This means they pay the workers less than they produce in exchange. That difference does not multiply over time. It comes about through definite agreements between labor and capital, which depends on capital’s ability to shut down production, reducing wages to zero, and waiting for the workers to return starving and willing to work at a lower rate. The capitalists do not abstain by shutting down production, they abstain by keeping it going. This means consuming less and investing more. It leads to less profit but a greater degree of force to use in breaking up the workers’ movement towards socialism.