The Radical Business Owner’s Guide to Profit
A Zine Trilogy By Kate Tyson
I’ve been chewing on the same two questions for years. How do business owners committed to positive social change actually deal with profit? And can a business be profitable without being exploitative?
Our businesses need profit to survive, but we don’t talk about it well. On one side are the voices telling you to maximize profit, a strategy well suited to stealing everyone else’s toys. On the other are people so wary of extractive capitalism that they treat profit itself with suspicion or distaste. I want more for us than those two poles.
These zine series proposes that we frame profit as a form of care. Non-exploitative profit is concerned with maintenance, sustainability, and tending to the people and ecosystems of a business, not with piling up individual wealth or chasing infinite growth.
The Radical Business Owner’s Guide to Profit is a zine series that takes up the questions of: what profit is, how to grapple with it inside your own business, and how we might contend with it as people who care about non-extractive, non-exploitative ways of being in the world. Volume One is out now.
Volume One: The Radical Business Owner's Guide to Profit
Volume One explores the mechanics of profit—what it is, how to grapple with it within your own business—while expanding a framework for how we might contend with profit as people that care deeply about non-extractive and non-exploitative ways of existing in the world.
What’s Inside: Table of Contents
What is Profit?
On Non-Exploitative Profit
Profit Maintains the Future
Feast/Famine
Available for purchase as a digital pdf file.
Volume Two: The Politics of Profit
Volume 2 (coming soon) takes up the question of where profit comes from and how it is created: a not uncontested question!
Volume Three: Profit as Care
Volume 3 (coming soon) considers different ways of working with profit as a form of care and maintenance.
