For all its purportedly radical goals, the movement for worker control within capitalism offers up curiously apolitical strategies to get there. They prioritize challenging property relations, but pay scant attention to the need to enter and transform the state, and seem to have little appreciation for how inter-firm competition helps reproduce capitalism’s social relations and priorities.

Linked to these shortcomings is the short shrift given to political agency and the kinds of class political capacities — as opposed to economic capacities — that “getting there” demands. This relative disinterest in power and agency is the movement’s most fundamental weakness.

How would workers actually take over workplaces not abandoned by capital? Is it right to expect workers to even want to do so given the uncertainties and lack of institutional support? What preparations are being made for the inevitable counter-attack from the state if this movement actually begins to threaten the economy’s dominant corporations and limit private capital accumulation? And beyond any threats from the state, how will these fragments of a new social order be coordinated and sheltered from the destructive pressures of domestic and international competition?

Organizing outside the state is undoubtedly important. Yet at some point, anticapitalist movements can’t avoid taking the struggle into the state. Historically, when workers have gone to the brink in terms of militancy but refused or lacked the strength to engage with the state, their rebellions faded or were brutally crushed. To ignore or downplay the need to build a movement that can take on state power is to lose by default.

A systematic consideration of the state isn’t just an issue for “later,” after the movement has become an actual threat. Rather, it is an immediate challenge — even when viewed in strictly economic terms.

Though worker-owned enterprises and co-ops have proven they can survive in particular niches or in economic spaces largely abandoned by corporations, confronting capitalism’s major banks and corporations is a completely different matter.

It strains credulity to expect worker-led enterprises to march out of capitalism’s shadows and replace corporate capital without the kind of support that can only come from states. The problem is not only that WSDEs and co-ops are disadvantaged from the beginning in terms of the workplaces and sub-sectors they have inherited, nor that they confront such a massive gap in financial, managerial, and technical resources as well as established connections to inputs and markets.

Above all, it is that competition trumps everything. Despite isolated exceptions, competing on capital’s terms while trying to hang on to values that don’t enhance competitiveness means repeatedly facing a choice between jettisoning those values and accepting defeat in competitive terms.

One common response to this dilemma is lobbying for special provisions for WSDEs and co-ops to partially correct the competitive disadvantage. These range from the easily agreed-upon policy of more “training,” to favorable start-up and financial subsidies and substantive technical and research support. Yet while survival may make such responses necessary, they also further legitimate the destructive impact of the competitive game.

The day-to-day realities of competition tend to fragment solidarities, pushing worker collectives to look out for themselves — making winners feel little need to foster broader solidarities and losers feel cynical about worker control.

The vortex of competitive pressures also spins its way into the inner workings of the collectives, giving greater weight to skills that markets deem more valuable and reproducing in-plant hierarchies that boost profitability.

The divisions can also be self-inflicted, as when Wolff insists on categorizing workers along the axis of productivity, determined on the basis of whether they make a direct contribution to the creation of a surplus. Whatever purpose this might serve in analyzing capitalism (dubious at best), the distinction is especially counterproductive in building class-based solidarity.

Giving some workers a higher status than others reinforces the lower status often accorded to laborers like office workers and cleaners (generally more precarious workers, often women and immigrants). The verbal gymnastics of describing so-called non-productive workers as nevertheless important or labeling them “enablers” does little to equalize their status. (Similarly, telling lower-paid fast-food workers they are less exploited than autoworkers because they don’t produce as much surplus value does little to build bonds of solidarity across the working class.)

There are reasons to hope worker-controlled enterprises flourish economically. But their success does not, by itself, produce a working class with the capacities to win the coming political battles.