Insights into Post-Capitalism: Why the Next Dominant Firm May Be Non-Distributing

[Davino]

Note: Due to the complexity of the topic and being English not my main language, AI was used to better articulate my own insights.

 

For years I tried to picture what is the next evolution beyond late-stage capitalism: one that is grounded and doesn't fully rely on the progressive evolution of collective values. My sticking point was structural: even if society’s values shift towards stage green of spiral dynamics (e.g. care, inclusion, sustainability), a profit-maximizing firm would still tend to get the upper hand because it can extract surplus (profits) for owners, raise capital aggressively, and scale faster. In a market engineered around maximization, “being nicer” is not a winning strategy; it’s a competitive disadvantage, unless the rules of the game change.

After years of no success, some days ago I had my first important insight: there is no need for a challenging systemic-market disruption. It requires the dominant enterprise structure to evolve.

The most plausible evolution of a post-capitalist economy is not the abolition of firms, not communism, not central planning, and not a stage green utopian shift in consumer ethics. It’s the rise of non-distributing enterprises: organizations that can compete in markets and generate surpluses, but cannot legally distribute those surpluses to private owners. Any excess is reinvested into developing their mission, strategic vision and value delivery.

This single constraint of 'no private extraction' changes everything and shifts money-centric capitalism to product-value-centric capitalism. It flips the organizing principle of the firm from “maximize profit for owners” to “maximize value delivered to stakeholders while remaining financially self-sustaining.”

 

A non-distributing firm (NDE) can still sell products, pay strong salaries, attract world-class talent, run cutting-edge Research & Development, and become operationally excellent. The difference is what happens to the surplus: instead of leaking upward as dividends and buybacks, it becomes fuel for a compounding reinvestment: higher wages, better tools, better service, lower prices, more R&D, deeper trust, longer horizons. This would give a competitive edge to NDEs over purely profit orange-based companies. So Cocacola would not be a good stock investment but a movement towards making the best beverages.

This changes the game because many publicly traded firms are structurally compelled to prioritize shareholder returns, even when doing so conflicts with long-term stakeholder value. In an NDE model, the same cash flows can be redirected into the core activity (e.g. product quality, reliability, innovation, and societal benefit) without requiring a global green value transformation from the collective, as well as bad actors.

The main drawback of NDEs is initial capital formation (bootstrapping): as they scale less through equity upside and more through retained earnings, debt, revenue-based financing, procurement, and mission-aligned capital. If those pathways mature, a post-capitalist economy can emerge organically: markets remain, competition remains; but extraction becomes structurally harder, and compounding reinvestment becomes the default.

The two greatest risks of non-distributing enterprises are corruption through conversion and decay through complacency. As organizations accumulate value, internal and external pressures push relentlessly towards making that value privately extractable; success itself becomes the danger (e.g. OpenAI). At the same time, removing profit incentives and takeover threats risks dulling ambition, especially at the executive level, replacing excellence with comfort. If unaddressed, these forces ensure that either the most successful organizations betray the model, or the most faithful ones underperform. For post-capitalism to scale, non-distribution must find cases of great success, and performance pressure must be consciously regenerated through culture, reputation, purpose, real accountability, excellence and love for the product rather than profit alone.

Post-capitalism, then, is not a rejection of markets, ambition, or competition, but a refinement of what they are optimized for. The shift towards non-distributing enterprises does not depend on a rejection of money, but on whether these organizations can remain attractive places to build, create, and excel while keeping surplus aligned with their purpose. In that sense, post-capitalism would not arrive as a rupture, but as a quiet selection process: where the firms that endure are those designed to compound value for society rather than convert it into private exit.

This is my prediction for the next macroscale stage of the global economy, and the structural foundation upon which stage green can realistically take root and endure over the coming centuries.