This Treatise is written to do something specific. It is not a manifesto, a policy proposal, or a critique for its own sake. It sets out to identify a structural fault line that runs through modern economic systems and to show, in concrete terms, how a different answer to that fault line can be built and sustained.
The fault line is not markets. Markets are tools. They allocate goods, set prices, and discipline firms. They do not determine who controls the surplus that production generates, how long that control lasts, or whether it compounds across firms and generations. Those outcomes are determined by accumulation. Any system that wishes to understand its long-run effects must therefore be understood as a system of surplus governance, not merely as a way of organizing exchange.
Accumulation is the organizing lens here because accumulation, not markets or distribution, is what distinguishes economic systems over time. Capitalism is defined less by profit than by the private accumulation of surplus as capital, compounded across firms and generations. Commons Capitalism does not challenge markets, competition, or enterprise growth; it challenges what surplus is permitted to become once it is produced. By treating surplus as a commons rather than as privately ownable capital, Commons Capitalism replaces capitalism’s accumulation logic while leaving ordinary market discipline intact. This work therefore addresses surplus, accumulation, and enterprise together, because it is the rules governing accumulation that determine whether an economic system stabilizes, concentrates wealth, or reproduces itself indefinitely.
The discussion begins from that premise and uses it consistently. It treats capitalism not as a cultural practice or moral category, but as an accumulation regime defined by the private capture and compounding of surplus as capital. It treats socialism, in its various forms, as a family of responses to the same problem, responses that prevent private capture by abolishing or subordinating markets through collective or public ownership. Both systems address the same underlying issue: who may control and accumulate surplus over time. Both also generate predictable structural failures of their own.
Commons Capitalism is introduced here as a third answer to that same problem. It does not seek to improve capitalism by redistribution, nor to replace it by planning. It retains markets, competition, enterprise formation, and failure. It changes one rule only: surplus may not be owned as a private claim. Once surplus is generated, it cannot be extracted, distributed, inherited, or converted into privately held capital. It is governed internally as a commons.
Commons Capitalism is not a comprehensive social system and does not aspire to be one. It does not replace taxation, public spending, or charitable activity. Redistribution through taxation remains the function of state and federal governments. Public goods remain the responsibility of political institutions. Charitable, cultural, and humanitarian work remains the province of civil society. Commons Capitalism addresses a narrower and more specific domain: the governance of surplus generated inside market enterprises. Its purpose is not to solve every social problem, but to remove one structural source of instability and concentration that other institutions cannot address from the outside.
The pages that follow will explain what that claim means, how it differs from public ownership or collective property, and why non-ownability is the critical move rather than sharing or redistribution. It will show how surplus can accumulate productively without enclosure, how enterprises can grow without producing owners, and how durability can be achieved without relying on political enforcement or moral restraint.
The Treatise proceeds in ten Parts, each building on the last.
The opening Parts identify the surplus–accumulation fault line and explain why markets are not the decisive variable. They contrast enclosure-based systems, which grow through capture and exclusion, with systems designed around structural retention.
The middle Parts set out Commons Capitalism itself. They define surplus as a commons, describe the Commons Capitalism Entity through which the system is implemented, and explain how governance functions once ownership disappears. These Parts address, directly and without evasion, the limits placed on worker participation, the prohibition on ownership claims of any kind, and the role of internal constraints in preventing capture from within.
Later Parts examine labor relations, class formation, and long-run economic dynamics. They address wages, benefits, reinvestment, demand stability, firm behavior, and growth under commons-based accumulation. They show why Commons Capitalism is neither a degrowth proposal nor a form of softened capitalism, and why accumulation continues even though capital ownership does not.
The final Parts address replication, failure modes, and system-level comparison. They explain how Commons Capitalism can arise through formation and acquisition without dependence on incentives or political favor, why its spread must be generational rather than rapid, and how it compares to capitalism and socialism as a peer system defined by a distinct accumulation logic. The Treatise closes by clarifying what Commons Capitalism changes permanently and what it deliberately leaves untouched.
This work does not propose using enterprise surplus to fund public goods, replace taxation, or serve civic purposes. It does not rely on subsidies, mandates, or coalition politics. Its scope is narrower and more demanding. It aims to show that a market-competitive enterprise system can be designed in which surplus accumulates without becoming privately ownable capital, and that such a system is now legally and institutionally possible in a way it was not before.
The Treatise is written for readers willing to engage a system on its own terms: economists, lawyers, institutional designers, and others prepared to follow an argument about structure rather than motive. It does not promise agreement. It promises clarity. If Commons Capitalism fails, it will fail for structural reasons that can be identified. If it succeeds, it will do so for the same reason.