In canada, they are very successfully organizing these via Community Cooperatives. Examples of these include common social, infrastructural services and facilities (now res communiea), retail, housing, and more. I should draw up some examples as they are quite fascinating.

The greatest issue with talking about the balance between consumer/worker ownership and democracy is that we eventually need to work on envisioning a breakdown of that economy, as it leads to an unncessary push-pull that can very easily be diffused via reframing economic activities around more horizontal, processural, situational, and network oriented perspectives.

Property ownership is an easy and obvious way to accomplish this, but must be ‘tempered’ through a “Terms of Operation” – a sort of “Property Left” similar to what the GNU GPL does for Virtual Sources – that organizations who understand the purpose can choose to apply to their own property.

The primary purpose of these “Terms of Operation” will be to automatically distribute property ownership in the growth of that entity to those who are willing to pay for it.

The way this goal can be accomplished is simply by treating Profit (the difference between Consumer_Price and Owner_Costs) as an Investment from the Consumer who pays it.