Purpose and Posture

Commons Capitalism is not an antique idea dressed up in new language. It is a structure that becomes practical only in the modern era, because the tools for governing a commons and the corporate mechanics for carrying that governance are both recent developments.

Commons Capitalism was not created to compete for applause against other systems. It was created to show that, within a market society, there is an available tool for correcting capitalism’s most damaging outcomes, and that is why it is being published. The point is to make the tool visible so those who are looking for a workable structure can see it, study it, and use it. The point is not to persuade everyone.

What a Commons Capitalism Entity Is

In plain terms, Commons Capitalism is implemented through a Commons Capitalism Entity, meaning a nonstock, nonmember, nonprofit corporation (a “commons corporation”) that wholly owns one or more market-facing Subsidiaries and stewards the enterprise’s Surplus under rules designed to prevent private capture. “Surplus” is the aggregate net earnings left after the enterprise pays its operating costs, wages, taxes, and other obligations. The critical difference is not competition, but what the structure requires the enterprise group to do with Surplus.

Dominant-Form Structure

Commons Capitalism, as structured, is the only plausible alternative enterprise form that could become dominant alongside capitalism, while remaining fully market-facing and without converting private property into public or collective property.

Why This Matters Now

Commons Capitalism matters now because it offers a practical way to build enterprises that can scale, compete, and endure while preventing private capture, without requiring society to convert private property into public or collective property. Here, “scale” means replication of the form itself, multiple commons corporations, each operating through multiple Subsidiaries, expanding from local to regional to national presence over time. This does not require government taking property or rewriting the basic rules of ownership. It operates within existing legal frameworks and market conditions through voluntary adoption of the form.

Commons Capitalism is also a technical late-arrival. A workable system for governing a commons was not set out in a way that could be widely applied until Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work reached a mature form in 1990. And the modern nonprofit corporate framework that can carry this kind of internal governance was not substantially updated until the late 1980s, when the Model Nonprofit Corporation Act was revised. Without both of those developments, the mechanics described here would have been far harder to design and harder still to explain in a way that could be implemented. That is why this model belongs to roughly the last thirty-five years, though the scholarly vacuum within that period is narrowed by the several years I have devoted to researching Commons Capitalism and Commons Capitalism Entities.

What It Seeks to Achieve

Commons Capitalism does not claim to be the only way to seek a more decent society. But it does aim at a concrete public good: spreading wealth broadly through workers over time, raising standards of living, and reducing the concentration of wealth in the economic elite. Part of that is simple economics. When wages and benefits rise for large numbers of workers, more money circulates through local businesses, services, and households, and that can lift the standard of living across the surrounding community. That is what it means to help communities, not as charity, but as a durable pattern of enterprise.

In that sense, the outcome is convergent with the aims of socialism, even though the method is different. Commons Capitalism does not start by converting private property into public or collective property. It starts by building an enterprise form that can compete and scale while structurally blocking private capture and keeping wealth circulating through workers across generations.

Limits of Ownership-Based Alternatives

A brief note about other systems, offered respectfully but plainly. Worker cooperatives, employee stock ownership plans, and other similar alternatives have helped real people. They deserve credit for that. But they also tend to have built-in limits on scale. In practice, they usually spread wealth primarily through worker ownership and the governance and financing that come with it. That can reach tens of thousands of worker-owners in a successful network, sometimes more. It is still a constraint.

Ownership-based models eventually pay themselves down. When workers retire or die, their property interests are redeemed or distributed, and that drains value out of the system instead of keeping it inside for future workers. Commons Capitalism avoids that drain because workers do not hold redeemable ownership interests that must be cashed out upon exit.

Built for Scale and Durability

Commons Capitalism was built for a different scale and a different audience. It is structured to reach tens of millions of workers, not just worker-owners, by building an entity that can replicate and acquire businesses over time while keeping the Surplus inside a commons. The aim is breadth and durability, not a niche model. It is meant to grow large enough that it is no longer an example, but a major type of organization.

A Practical Path Inside Markets

Commons Capitalism is meant to be a practical way to correct the problems capitalism tends to create, without abandoning markets. Markets are powerful, competition is real, and businesses have to perform. This model does not pretend otherwise. But it also refuses to accept the idea that the purpose of a business is to make a small group wealthy forever while everyone else is treated as a cost to be minimized.

In everyday terms, Commons Capitalism asks one question: what if the wealth created by a business could be stewarded in a way that benefits the people who actually do the work—past, present, and future workers—without turning the business into a charity and without handing it over to the government?

What Happens to Surplus

That is what a Commons Capitalism Entity is designed to do. It is still a business. It still faces the same market pressures. It still has to compete, budget, hire, fire, train, invest, and grow. But the biggest difference is what happens to Surplus. In most standard models, Surplus is a prize to be captured by owners and investors. In this model, Surplus is treated as a commons, something to be managed and protected so it can do long-term work inside the enterprise group.

This model spreads wealth primarily through premium wages, durable benefits, and disciplined reinvestment over time, rather than through individual redemption rights in a property interest.

And this is the point that matters to me: Commons Capitalism and Commons Capitalism Entities are not just a list of goals or a set of good intentions. They give the physical structure of a business organization that can actually carry out those objectives. They put the how on paper. They provide a framework that can be built, replicated, governed, audited, and enforced over time.

Commons Capitalism and Commons Capitalism Entities are designed to provide workers with the kinds of wages, benefits, and baseline economic security that labor unions have fought for over generations. The difference is not that unions are unnecessary or unimportant. The difference is that, in this form, those outcomes are not merely demanded at the bargaining table. They are baked into the structure by design—not by discretion—and financed from the way Surplus is stewarded over time.

Incentives and Structure

That framing matters, because capitalism’s problems are not just about greed or bad people. They are structural. If the rules of the game reward private capture, private capture will happen. If the rules reward short-term extraction, short-term extraction will dominate. Even well-meaning managers get pulled into it. They may not like it, but the incentives are the incentives.

A Personal Note

And here is where I will speak plainly about myself. I am exhausted. I hate having to sell this concept, as if I were some huckster with a miracle cure. I did not build this to go out and win arguments. I built it because I wanted people to see that there is an invaluable tool available inside a market society that changes what happens to Surplus and who it ultimately serves. Yet the moment a person hears “new model,” the conversation often turns into a contest: politics, identity, labels, and loyalty tests. That is not what I am trying to do.

To be candid, I do not have unlimited energy for persuasion. I am over seventy years old. This is long-horizon work. It may take twenty-five years for the first Commons Capitalism Entity to be implemented in a meaningful way, and it may take another seventy-five years for the form to spread broadly enough to become a dominant enterprise form alongside capitalism, in head-to-head competition with investor-owned companies. That is not a complaint. It is simply the reality of building durable institutions inside market conditions. But if Commons Capitalism can spread wealth through workers over time, then it is worth putting the mechanics on paper now so others can test them, criticize them, improve them, and build on them.

An Invitation to Test the Mechanics

That is the spirit of this work. It is offered modestly; but it is offered seriously. It is put on the table. It is explained in plain terms. Then others, especially economists, lawyers, business people, and workers, can decide what to do with it.

If someone is satisfied with the status quo, this is not for them. If someone wants an argument, they will find one no matter what. But if someone is looking for a workable structure, something that keeps the discipline of markets while reducing wealth concentration and strengthening workers over time, then it is worth knowing that this exists.

The request is simple: examine the mechanics, stress-test the assumptions, and determine where the structure breaks and how it can be improved.