According to Marx, which of the following explains what Lakshmi's fac…

Lakshmi once wove cane baskets at home and gave them to relatives at festivals. After a road linked her village to the town, she joined a packaging factory owned by a businessman. She now works fixed hours there and is paid every week; the machines, the materials and the boxes she makes belong to the owner. Her neighbour, a retired teacher, has begun giving tuition to village children for a monthly fee. An agent from a city hospital has also been visiting poor families, offering money to anyone willing to give a kidney to a rich patient. The village elders are divided over these changes.

According to Marx, which of the following explains what Lakshmi's factory job shows about labour under the capitalist mode of production?

Answer & explanation

Correct answer: option 2

The correct answer is Option (2) → She must sell her labour power in the market to earn a wage, so labour itself becomes a commodity.

Option (1) Workers are paid the value of what they actually produce, so labour is exchanged fairly. — Incorrect. Marx held the opposite. Capitalists pay workers less than the value of what they produce and keep the difference as surplus value, so the exchange is not fair.

Option (2) She must sell her labour power in the market to earn a wage, so labour itself becomes a commodity. — Correct. Lakshmi owns no machines or materials, so she can live only by selling her labour power to the factory owner for a weekly wage. For Marx, this is how labour itself becomes a commodity under capitalism.

Option (3) The economy consists of goods circulating in the market, so her output, not her work, is the commodity. — Incorrect. Marx argued the reverse. The economy is not things circulating in the market but relations between people linked through production, and what Lakshmi sells is her labour power.

Option (4) Human beings themselves are bought and sold, so the worker herself becomes the commodity. — Incorrect. This describes slavery, when human beings themselves were bought and sold. Lakshmi stays a free person who sells only her labour power, for fixed hours.

NCERT (2026-27): “4.2 Understanding Capitalism as a Social System
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. As you have already learned, 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. …”

According to Marx, which of the following explains what Lakshmi's factory job shows about labour under the capitalist mode of production?

Answer & explanation

Correct answer: option 2

The correct answer is Option (2) → She must sell her labour power in the market to earn a wage, so labour itself becomes a commodity.