[7] The ownership and organization of the social means of production is a key factor in categorizing and defining different types of economic systems.
The means of production includes two broad categories of objects: instruments of labor (tools, factories, infrastructure, etc.)
The analysis of the technological sophistication of the means of production and how they are owned is a central component in the Marxist theoretical framework of historical materialism and in Marx's critique of political economy, and later in Marxian economics.
In Marx's work and subsequent developments in Marxist theory, the process of socioeconomic evolution is based on the premise of technological improvements in the means of production.
The increasing efficiency of the means of production via the creation and adaptation of new technologies over time has a tendency to rearrange local and global market structures, leading to the disruption of existing profit pools, creating the possibility of massive economic impact.
[11] According to Marx, escalating tension between the upper and lower class is a major consequence of technology decreasing the value of labor force and the contradictory effect an evolving means of production has on established social and economic systems.
Marx believed increasing inequality between the upper and lower classes acts as a major catalyst of class conflicts, which develop to a point where the existing mode of production inevitably becomes unsustainable, either collapsing or being overthrown in a social revolution, at which point the contradictory relationship between technological advancement and the value of labor force is resolved by the emergence of a new mode of production based on a different set of social relations including, most notably, different patterns of ownership for the means of production.
Examples of the capitalist class include business owners, shareholders and the minority of people who own factories, machinery and lands.
In human resource practices, compensation structure tends to shift towards pay-for-performance bonus or incentive pay rather than base salary to attract the right workers, even if conflicts of interest exist in an employer-worker relationship.
[17] To the question of why classes exist in human societies in the first place, Karl Marx offered a historical and scientific explanation that it was the cultural practice of ownership of the means of production that gives rise to them.
This explanation is consistent with the bulk of Marxist theory in which Politics and Religion are seen as mere outgrowths (superstructures) of the basic underlying economic reality of a people.
Different from the pure capitalism, the government regulation exists to control particular means of production over the private business sector.