Re-politicizing co-ops would mean rejoining the socialist movement: becoming active again in socialist-oriented campaigns, integrating socialist education into their contacts with members and the community, extending their facilities to serve as cultural and political spaces (coffee shops, bookstores, pubs, places for public forums).

Especially intriguing is the suggestion, which has roots in some past practices, that co-ops set aside a portion of sales to fund union, community, and socialist organizing. Buying co-op would then amount to more than just the expression of a consumer preference. It would signal a commitment to a larger political project.

In the case of worker-owned enterprises, politicization represents a more radical challenge. As emphasized above, a strategy based on taking over plants abandoned by capital while accepting the competitive straitjacket of capitalist markets may make a certain practical sense. But it simply cannot be a base for social transformation. Politicizing worker self-management demands a focus on the context within which they operate.

To accomplish this politicization, WSDEs must be integrated into larger complexes — whether organized on a regional or sectoral basis — that directly meet social needs, and they need to be at least partially sheltered, through a significant degree of planning, from the destructive pressures of competition. The scale required for such planning can only happen at the level of the state.