Socialism and Empowerment

Working for someone else who is the owner of the means of production is a heteronomous condition that constitutes self-alienation, according to Marx-Engels.  Likewise, self-employment is autonomous.  However, the shortcoming of the latter is that one's power is limited to the scope of the means of production which one owns, usually to one activity.  In contrast, as they observe, the collective ownership of the means of production opens the autonomy of any member to a wide, perhaps infinite, range of activities in which to exercise one's abilities.  So, central to their Moral argument for Socialism is that it empowers any individual to an extent impossible in any other system.