Difficulties quickly emerge in proposals to introduce worker self-management within capitalism, particularly when it comes to ownership. Albert and Hahnel were always careful to insist workers did not own their particular workplace, even if they controlled it — the workplace belonged to society as a whole.

They argued that workers should “direct” their workplaces because they are the ones “most affected” by what happens there, but in order for socialist democracy to work, everyone affected by workplace decisions — other workers as well as consumers and the community — must have a say in how to spend the surpluses generated by production.

However, thorny questions about ownership — and the mediation between means and ends more broadly — arise when worker control is implemented within capitalism, a system in which the institutionalization of property requires that ownership legally and substantively reside somewhere.

If state ownership is rejected as a proxy for the commons and if ownership in worker-controlled enterprises is in the hands of the workers, then these groups of workers essentially become their own capitalists. They have ownership rights, mobilize their own finances, and control and reinvest “their” surplus for their own advantage.