As Marx explains in Chapter 9 of Capital:

“During the second period of the labour-process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the workman, it is true, labours, expends labour-power; but his labour, being no longer necessary labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the working day, I name surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time, I give the name of surplus labour.”

He continues:

“It is every bit as important, for a correct understanding of surplus-value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of surplus labour-time, as nothing but materialised surplus labour, as it is, for a proper comprehension of value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labour, as nothing but materialised labour. The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.”

These quotes from Capital definitively settle the argument. The WSWS has abandoned Marxism in favor of a new pandemic-inspired form of anti-Marxism. According to Marx, the capitalist creates surplus-value “out of nothing,” merely charging the worker more in exchange for what he pays the worker. That extra labor he takes from the worker comes during the second part of the day, after the wages have been paid for with an equal value of work in the first part of the day.

In order to see this as not a day-long, but an instantaneous process or a pre-existing condition within society passed on from previous forms of slavery, Marx says we must understand surplus value as “a mere congelation of so many hours of labor, as nothing but materialized labor.” The surplus-value exists not through production itself but as congealed “surplus labor”, the amount of time given by the worker to the capitalist in exchange for the wages paid by the capitalist. It forms, not as a result of productive activity by the capitalist but as a fetter on production, a relationship inherited from previous class societies such as slavery. This grants the capitalist the right, drawn from the historical position of ruling classes in general, to extract labor from the “actual producer.” In that way, the capitalist creates “profit” in the moment of exchange or constantly through his historical position as a member of the ruling class.

In the footnotes of Chapter 9, Marx quotes Ricardo:

“To an individual with a capital of £20,000, whose profits were £2,000 per annum, it would be a matter quite indifferent whether his capital would employ a 100 or 1,000 men, whether the commodity produced sold for £10,000 or £20,000, provided, in all cases, his profit were not diminished below £2,000. Is not the real interest of the nation similar? Provided its net real income, its rent and profits, be the same, it is of no importance whether the nation consists of 10 or of 12 millions of inhabitants.”
(Ric. l.c.,.p. 416.)

For this reason, the WSWS lie that the capitalist class demands a return to work in order to “produce profit” serves as a defense of the capitalist class and a threat to the revolutionary movement. They do not seek to increase production to increase profits. They seek to endanger the lives of workers and in so doing elevate themselves as a ruling class that has power over life and death and not only the labor process. By proving their power to kill or sicken workers, they gain the power over them to drive them to war or into a police state and domestic spying, torture, and persecution to eliminate internal threats from socialism. Only by recognizing the capitalist class as a ruling class and not a laboring class, not “actual producers”, can the workers break the chains of capitalism and establish a new economic order based on the defense of the social rights of the majority of the population, including their right to an equal or proportionate part of the products of their labor.

Another way of looking at it produces the same result. During the lock-down, production does not stop completely. Society only focuses on “essential work”, the work necessary to maintain human life and an organized, modern society that does not break up into primitive or war-making groups. As a result, essential work previously ignored comes into focus. The essential work of uplifting the working class enters the agenda. For this reason, an end to the lock-down allows the capitalists to employee inessential work, the work that only serves to protect the privileges of the ruling class. This inessential work comes to dominate society during the periods when lock-downs end, and society saved from existential threat and no longer forced to spend on such things as eviction bans and universal income, can now accumulate wealth in order to maintain its social structure against the natural process of wearing down. The poor can return to homelessness and hunger and the rich can return to excessive greed and the planned destruction of the people and the planet.

By seeing things correctly, objectively, with sound theories, as Marx would have us do, we better understand the policies of the capitalist state and can better offer socialist policies in their place. The ruling class needs to create suffering for millions of people through eviction, a fetter on production. In order to increase production of socially necessary commodities, housing, clean water, etc., a planned economy controlled by the working class itself, through democratically controlled workers’ committees, must replace the planned economy of the oligarchy.

After proving that surplus value can appear in divisions of the product by space, the first method, and not only time, the second method, Marx argues in conclusion that the methods based on time alone will often serve to confuse the issue by eliminating the labor-time used to produce the raw materials and tools from the equation, offering practical use for the barbaric manufacturing class.

“It is also a perfectly correct method: being in fact the first method given above with this difference, that instead of being applied to space, in which the different parts of the completed product lie side by side, it ideals with time, in which those parts are successively produced. But it can also be accompanied by very barbarian notions, more especially in the heads of those who are as much interested, practically, in the process of making value beget value, as they are in misunderstanding that process theoretically.”

That is, the party bureaucracy, so convinced that value begets value, seeks to reinforce a theoretical misunderstanding of that process. Privilege begets quality, they argue. In fact, privilege robs quality from actual producers. In order to restore the party to its socialist foundations, the bureaucracy must submit to formal procedures to defend “actual producers” from committee-stacking by privileged members of the middle class. That is, the privilege that comes with producing endless articles that pass along the same theoretical misunderstanding all the more repetitively adds no value when compared with theoretically accurate works such as Marx’s Capital. For this reason, Marx’s decision to shift from publishing his newspaper to producing complete theoretical works proved far more valuable for the revolutionary movement than the journalistic waste-products of the WSWS journalistic school.