Class, Stratum, Pyramid

Marx's inclusion of Land as a Means of Production tends to obscure the stratification of the category. For example, in a simple case, there is a piece of land, a building on the land, and machinery inside the building. Likewise, there can be three distinct owners of those means of production, i. e. the land-owner, the developer who rents the land and constructs the building, and the owner of the machinery who rents the building. Now, the immediate exploiter of the operators of the machinery is the owner of the manufacturing company, but a portion of those profits ends up in the hands of the developer, with the land-owner the ultimate destination of some of that. So, the concept of Class-Conflict, like that of Means of Production, tends to obscure that the Working Class is the foundation of a pyramidal system, rather than one of merely two opposing tiers.