I Don’t Believe We Can Run “Anti-Capitalist Businesses.”
On challenging capitalism from within capitalism, practicing greater discernment with our language, and building businesses rooted in care rather than extraction.
Before I even begin, I want to acknowledge that my perspective on this topic has shifted significantly over the years as I’ve learned more about systems of power and our place in challenging and—hopefully—dismantling them.
Of all the people who have impacted me in this particular learning, Brooke Monaghan is the person who has most informed my perspective on this theme in particular and I want to give them due diligence.
Also, Brooke and I are co-facilitating a virtual workshop soon, on Business Modeling and Pricing for Equity and Access. Perhaps it’ll be of interest to you…onto the article.
Now, I know the anti-capitalist business coaches out there might not like what I’m about to say.
But here’s the thing: I don’t believe we can practice “anti-capitalist business.” Not really. Not if we are exchanging money for services inside a market economy. Not if we are relying on payment processors, banks, social media platforms, email marketing tools, taxes, rent, internet access, devices, and all the other infrastructures that make a business possible under capitalism.
We can challenge capitalism. We can question it. We can—and should!—imagine and practice new ways of doing business that do not minimize everything to transaction, extraction, urgency, domination, and profit-at-all-costs.
We can build offers with more care. We can create more access. We can refuse manipulation. We can redistribute resources. We can be more transparent. We can tend to power dynamics.
But we literally cannot conduct business outside of capitalism while we are still inside capitalism.
And I think it’s important that we stop pretending we can.
Capitalism is not just “charging money.”
Sometimes when people say “anti-capitalist business,” what they seem to mean is:
I don’t use manipulative sales tactics.
I offer sliding scale pricing.
I care about accessibility.
I don’t want my business to be extractive.
I don’t believe my worth is measured by productivity.
I want to make enough money without dehumanizing myself or others.
Beautiful. Same. Yes to all of that. But none of those things make a business anti-capitalist.
They may make it more trauma-informed—more access-oriented, more relational. And I actually think that language is more precise, more honest, and more powerful. Because capitalism is not simply the act of charging money.
Capitalism is a system organized around accumulation, extraction, privatization, competition, wage labor, ownership, hierarchy, and profit. And the current expression of capitalism is deeply entangled with white supremacy, racism, settler colonialism, patriarchy, ableism, and dehumanization.
So when we say, “My business is anti-capitalist,” I want us to ask: Is it? Or are we trying to name our discomfort with capitalism while still participating in it?
Participation is not the same as moral failure.
This is where I think a lot of us get tangled.
We know capitalism is harmful. We know it shapes our relationship to work, money, bodies, relationships, time, productivity, care, rest, success, and survival.
And because we know this, many of us want to distance ourselves from it.
We want to say: I’m not like that. My business is different. My pricing is different. My marketing is different. My work is different. And maybe it is.
But operating within capitalism is not a personal moral failure. It is a structural reality. That distinction matters.
Because if we make participation itself the problem, then we end up either pretending we have somehow transcended the system or shaming ourselves—and our clients and audience?!—for needing to survive inside it. Neither of those responses helps us build a more liberatory practice or world.
We cannot shame ourselves out of capitalism. We cannot brand ourselves out of capitalism. We cannot aestheticize our way out of capitalism. And we cannot dismantle or challenge capitalism by pretending we are not participating in it.
So what can we do? We can be more honest.
We can say: Here’s how I try to center care and relationship over transaction and extraction in my business. Here’s how I consider power structures, my place within them, and seek to create access where possible. Here’s how I share my offers, how I practice audience sensitivity—understanding that I’m trying to reach people who are having real experiences of distress. Here’s how I practice accountability in a world of inequity.
To me, this is where the real work begins. It’s not about claiming anything, finding the perfect language, or positioning ourselves with the right buzz words.
In fact, I would argue we will benefit when we learn to tell the truth about who we are and about what we do in our work—and how we do it.
Better language gives us better practice.
Instead of saying “anti-capitalist business,” maybe we mean:
Trauma-informed business.
Access-oriented pricing.
Relational marketing.
Consent-based sales.
Culturally competent leadership.
Transparent business practices.
Community-accountable decision-making.
Solidarity-rooted entrepreneurship.
Values-based marketing.
Anti-oppressive business practices.
These are not interchangeable, and none of them are perfect. But they give us more specific language for the actual practices we’re trying to build. And specificity matters.
When our language gets too broad, it can become a bypass. It can let us claim an identity without examining the practices underneath it. It can let us say “anti-capitalist” while still underpaying collaborators, centering whiteness and cisheteronormativity, preying on “pain points” and urgency, ignoring accessibility, hoarding resources, or treating our audience as a means to an end.
The label does not liberate us. The practice is what matters.
Access does not require self-erasure.
I also think we need to talk about the way “anti-capitalist” language sometimes gets weaponized against the very people trying to survive. Especially service providers, creatives, artists, wellness and mental health practitioners, facilitators, educators, and small business owners who are already undercharging, overgiving, and burning themselves out.
Sometimes “anti-capitalist business” becomes code for:
You should always be accessible.
You should always charge less.
You should give more away.
You should be endlessly available.
You should not need to make much money.
You should feel guilty for wanting your work to support you.
That is not liberation—that is self-erasure dressed up as virtue.
Access matters. Deeply. But access does not require us to disappear. A business that cannot sustain the human running it is not automatically more ethical. Sometimes it is simply another expression of extraction.
We can resist dehumanization.
So no, I don’t believe we can run an anti-capitalist business. But I do believe we can run businesses that resist dehumanization. We can run businesses that refuse manipulation. We can run businesses that redistribute access. We can run businesses that tell the truth about power—and our proximity to it. We can run businesses that practice care inside the violence of these systems. We can run businesses that make room for consent, complexity, rest, relationship, and accountability. And that matters.
Maybe the goal is not to prove that we are outside capitalism. Maybe the goal is to become more honest about where we are, what we are participating in, what we are resisting, and what we are building anyway.
Because we will not get free just because we find better language.
We get freer through daily choices, actions, and practice, through relationship, accountability, and through refusing to let capitalism be the only imagination available to us.
And that work is much harder than a label. It is also much more powerful.
My first book, WE ARE THE MESSAGE: Rethinking Visibility, Marketing, and Power in the Digital Age, will be available in March 2027 from North Atlantic Books. Subscribe to my newsletter to get all the book updates as we get closer.