Capitalism can be associated with :

(A) Industrial production, commodification

(B) Surplus value, free market

(C) Weekly market, commodity exchange

(D) Money power, labour power

Choose the correct answer from the options given below :

(1) (C), (A), (B) only

(2) (B), (C), (D) only

(3) (A), (B), (D) only

(4) (C), (D), (A) only

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One of the founders of modern sociology, Karl Marx, was also a critic of modern capitalism. Marx understood capitalism as a system of commodity production, or production for the market, through the use of wage labour. Marx wrote that all economic systems are also social systems. Each mode of production consists of particular relations of production, which in turn give rise to a specific class structure. He emphasised that the economy does not consist of things (goods circulating in the market), but is made up of relations between people who are connected to one another through the process of production. Under the capitalist mode of production, labour itself becomes a commodity, because workers must sell their labour power in the market to earn a wage. This gives rise to two basic classes – capitalists, who own the means of production (such as the factories), and workers, who sell their labour to the capitalists. The capitalist class is able to profit from this system by paying the workers less than the value of what they actually produce, and so extracting surplus value from their labour.