The Reluctant Capitalist
BUILD YOUR BUSINESS WITHOUT SELLING YOUR SOUL
by Marisa Guthrie | Practical Inspiration Publishing · October 2026
You don’t have to reject capitalism to refuse its rules.
“The question isn’t whether we participate in capitalism. It’s how we choose to participate.”
I have spent more than thirty years building businesses, leading organisations and working with entrepreneurs. Long enough to know that I believe in business as a force for change in society — and long enough to have serious questions about the system we are doing business in.
The Reluctant Capitalist came out of that tension.
So much of what we are taught about business asks us to accept things that deserve to be questioned: that more is always better, that growth is always the goal, that profit matters more than people or planet. That there is something wrong with us when we can’t keep producing, scaling and selling at the pace the system demands.
I don’t believe the answer is to reject business, money or profit. I believe we need to become much more intentional about how we create them.
This book is about what becomes possible when we stop treating the rules of capitalism as the rules of business. When we decide what we are and aren’t willing to participate in. And when we build businesses that make good money not despite our values, but because those values shape the way we work.
READ AN EXCERPT
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From Introduction
"My definition of a reluctant capitalist is someone who operates in this system by default, but who understands at a fundamental level that they are part of a wider ecosystem of business, community, and humanity. In other words, they are the antithesis to the neoliberal view of business which insists that the business owner is separate from the community the business operates in so that they can extract profit with impunity.
Being a business owner and being a capitalist are not the same thing. You can’t do much to change the capitalist system, but through the practices I will share with you, you can do much to reframe your own experiences and therefore the decisions you make about your business and the money you make."
Who This Book Is For
This book is for the entrepreneur who wants to make good money without accepting that profit must come at the expense of people, the planet, or their own well-being.
For the person who believes in business but has started to question many of its assumptions: that extraction and profit with impunity are justified, that more is inherently better, and that success requires us to keep working, producing, and consuming at an ever-increasing pace.
It is for anyone who has wondered whether there is another way to participate in capitalism without simply reproducing its worst excesses.
The Reluctant Capitalist is an invitation to question the rules we have inherited, decide which ones we actually want to keep, and become more intentional about the businesses we build, the money we make, and what we choose to do with it.
“The Reluctant Capitalist is the book that all small and micro business owners and solopreneurs need to read. Many of us have never felt supported by the wider business ecosystem, and the exhausting resilience required to simply survive is punishing….Marisa has comprehensive lived experience of working with SME’s and solopreneurs, and this deep understanding of their obstacles and constraints means that the insights shared within these pages offer hope as well as practical strategies to help business owners stop performing running a business and start building in a way that protects their values and contributes to society.”
Stacey Sheppard - Award-winning writer, Founder of The Tribe
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One Philosophy. Three Ways to Engage With It.
The Reluctant Capitalist is part of my philosophy and body of work about how we make money, build businesses, and participate in capitalism in alignment with our values. The book changes the way you think about business. The work that follows changes the way you build one.
01 — READ THE BOOK
My writing on Substack takes these ideas further, exploring what ethical entrepreneurship looks like in practice and questioning the conventional business wisdom we are still being asked to follow.
02 — READ THE NEWSLETTER
The Reluctant Capitalist challenges many of the assumptions we have inherited about business, money, growth and success — and explores what we can build instead.
03 — REDESIGN YOUR BUSINESS
Apply the philosophy to the way your own business works. The Ethical Entrepreneurship Ecosystem™ is my methodology for redesigning a business to generate meaningful profit while protecting the things you care about most.
Read the Introduction
Start with the question behind The Reluctant Capitalist.
Read the Introduction for free and discover why I believe we need to question the rules we have inherited about business, money, growth and success — without rejecting business or profit in the process.
I’ll send it straight to your inbox, along with occasional writing about the ideas behind the book and what it means to build a profitable business differently.
Where to Get the Book
AVAILABLE OCTOBER 2026
About the Author
Marisa Guthrie has spent more than thirty years building, leading and advising purpose-driven organisations, as a founder, CEO, business coach and policy adviser working at both grassroots and national levels.
The Reluctant Capitalist draws on those three decades of experience to question many of the assumptions we have inherited about business, money, growth and success. Part critique and part practical alternative, it explores how we can build profitable businesses within capitalism without simply reproducing the parts of the system we want to change.
Marisa is the founder of the Ethical Entrepreneurial Ecosystem™, a methodology for designing businesses that generate meaningful profit while protecting the things their founders care about most.