Building worker's cooperatives - right or wrong?

[NowNoted]

Would it be acceptable to work through the capitalist system to build worker owned cooperative businesses? I'm a small business owner relatively recently "awakened" to revolutionary theory. I'd like to start small businesses and sell them at a fair valuation to the employees, and I feel like this could be a decent life mission for me, based on my skills and interests - to increase working class power by transferring capital from the business class to the workers.

Do the ends (newly created worker owned cooperative businesses) justify the means, which is me potentially profiting from the work of the employees, then profiting from the sale of the business? I have to feed my family too, and we still live in capitalism at the moment. I'm just wondering whether, in your opinions, this goal is compatible with my methods, if you can see any problems or better ways of doing this, etc.

Thank you!

[Blake's Baby]

We do live in capitalism at the moment. We all have to get along inside the system as it exists until such time as we can change it.

Will worker-owned businesses be a step towards that change? No.

Will you 'setting up companies' then selling them, be a way of increasing the working class's self-confidence and organisational capacity? No.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

I think that there are valuable things about workers' co-ops:

1. A fund-raising strategy. I know of an instance in Winnipeg where a workers' co-op paid most of the rent in a building that housed a variety of radical organizations, meeting space, etc.

2. The experience of organizing production, distribution, etc. "from the bottom up", or of seizing production. In either case, what matters is the workers' learning in self-directed activity.

I think the last part of Blake's Baby's critique - that setting up businesses to sell to the workers won't do much good - is relatively on point. If you have an interest in workers' co-ops, why not try joining one as a worker?