https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/22/bdff-s22.html

“But the growing problems in the Chinese property market is feeding into a general assessment that, far from experiencing a bounce back as governments scrap public health measures to deal with the pandemic, the world economy is entering a downswing.”

As Democratic Power argued, the profit of capitalists comes from exploitation not production. The WSWS defends the capitalist system that a return to work leads to increased profits. This argument comes from Marx’s book Capital, analyzing the capitalist economy. Lenin also argued that Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, in which destruction of capital alone can raise the rate of profit. This occurs because the export of excess production can find no outlet since every part of the world has already fallen under the influence of one empire or another. Returning to production does not destroy capital but set it back to work from idleness. This reduces the rate of profit.

In any case, the profit comes to the capitalist not through production processes but through the moment of the exchange of labor power for wages. If we have a production of 10 units before the pandemic and 2 units after the pandemic, the capitalist can claim the same amount of revenue by increasing the price to 5 times the previous price. Now for 2 units of sales, they receive the same revenue as they did for 10 units of sales before. The same revenue. At the lower rate of production, however, the costs have decreased from the cost of producing 10 units to the cost of producing 2 units. With lower costs and equal revenue, the capitalist has reduced production and increased his profit. He also eliminated the workers’ wages that would have gone towards producing the other 8 units.

The WSWS defense of capitalism eliminates all economic logic in the interests of preserving in theory the capitalist system. The return to work has disproven the WSWS theory in defense of capitalism and proven that real Marxism does not produce the same glaring contradictions. The return to work does not have the economic motive of increasing profit. The concentration of wealth during the lock-downs continued apace. The WSWS must apologize and retract its false theory or dig in its heels to defend increasingly untenable positions as a nano-bureaucracy rather than a revolutionary party.

The real motive of a return to work has more to do with the economic motive of the capitalist class to remain the ruling class despite losses for some capitalists who could not compete with the oligarchs and the monopoly. It can only remain the ruling class by consciously fighting the socialist revolution and its economic source in the suffering of the proletariat, including through the use of wars and atrocities, of which the coronavirus is only a first phase. The return to work will sicken many workers and break up many organizations of the working class. It will allow for a concealed violence against revolutionary political and cultural leaders. Only a conscious turn to revolutionary politics by the workers and the establishment of new democratically controlled workers’ states will end the cycle of increased violence between the two sides of the imperialist conflict, led by the US and China.