Most of the world's population have to sell their skills and time to members of the employing class in order to make a living.  These people are part of the working class.  They are dependent on their wages as a means of making a living.

The employing class is made up of capitalists and State bureaucrats who hire members of the working class for wages which are the price of labour power on the market.   They sell the product of their wage-slave's labour (goods and or services) in the marketplace for commodities and thus make their living this way, from the profits from sale. The employing class is quite small, averaging about 5%-10% of the population.  Most of the big capital owners in this class hire managers for wages to manage their enterprises.  Some of the small fry employers actually work in the enterprises which they own.

The landlord class makes up another chunk of humanity.  These people make their living mostly from renting land and buildings which they own to workers and employers.  They also speculate on land, they own, driving up the price and selling for fiancial gain.

There are only two sources of wealth: Nature and human labour.  Human labour is now bought and sold in the marketplace for wages.  The bulk of the wealth of the society is piled up in commodities which are not owned by their creators as Nature 'owns' nothing and workers own only their own skills and time which they are obliged to sell for wages, if they want to make a living. 

Some of the wealth workers produce during the time they've sold to their employers, goes to the State via various forms of taxation and that wealth is used to fund various activities of the political State e.g. military, roads, administrative bureaucracies, police, fire, schools and so on.  The point is that all this wealth should be controlled by its producers.  Obiviously, it's not controlled by Nature nor by the working class.  It is controlled by the owning classes: the capitalists and landlords and by the politicians they get elected to their State. 

An interesting argument coming from U.S. based anarchists: 

This message from Karl Marx back in 1845 seems relevant for today's market turmoil and our general sense of being tossed around because bankers and speculators have gambled with the wealth we've created.  At the same time, it is a message to those who still hold onto the notion that Marx's position had much do to with Lenin's position vis a vis the communist revolution.

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Finally, from the conception of history we have sketched we obtain these further conclusions:

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About the Course

Ideas and objects which have been invested with human power are reified.  Reified thinking projects the social world, camera obscura, upside down.  It is the leitmotif of modern day language construction which affects the way we see how the world works, as opposed to how it actually works. 

Examples of reified thinking abound: Ford makes good cars; but Mercedes does a better job.  It was God's will.  Channel no.5 makes me sexy.  You can trust Bank of America with your details. 

What's really going on is that the subject-object relationship has been turned upside-down in one's head.  Ford and even Mercedes is actually the product of many workers' labour.  God is an idea, created by humans.  Ideas do not have will outside of the humans who create them.  Channel no. 5 is the product of many peoples' labour which is sold.  A commodity has no sexuality.  The brand name, Bank of America, is really just the work of many people working within a financial division of labour.  It is also a company which is owned by a few people.  Can you trust an abstraction?

"Any person who has participated in a non-hierarchical kind of organization, even a small one, knows that, in the absence of  mechanisms that protect plurality and foster participation, "horizontality" soon becomes a fertile soil for the survival of the fittest. Any such person also knows how frustrating and limited it is to have organizations in which each and everyone are always forced to gather in assemblies to make decisions on every single issue of a movement -from general political strategy to fixing a leaking roof. The "tyranny of structurelessness", as Jo Freeman used to say, exhausts our movements, subvert their
 principles, and makes them absurdly inefficient.

 "Contrary to the usual belief, autonomous and horizontal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 133 .... August 25, 2008
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The Myth of the
Tragedy of the Commons

Ian Angus

Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is community
ownership of land, forests and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological
disaster? Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end
Third World poverty? Most economists and development planners will answer
"yes" -- and for proof they will point to the most influential article ever
written on those important questions.

Since its publication in Science in December 1968, "The Tragedy of the
Commons" has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the
most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. It is
also one of the most-quoted: a recent Google search found "about 302,000"
results for the phrase "tragedy of the commons."