In this powerful poem titled ‘Sarmayadari’ (Capitalism), progressive poet Asrarul Haq Majaz repeatedly invokes the tropes of ‘monstrosity’ to portray how capitalism sucks the blood of, strangulates, and walks on the bodies of the poor and builds with their bones the chariots of the rich. Capital devours human beings and nature in an endless drive for profits. This insatiable drive for profiteering in recent times has been particularly intensified by finance capital. We live in times when bankers and the financial elite, who are in unprecedented control of the capitalist world, take the monstrosity of capitalism to new levels (Hudson, 2015; Lapavitsas, 2013).

Never in the history of humankind has such a tiny financial elite exercised so much control over the fate of humanity and caused so much mass destruction. Phillips (2018: 31) describes how the transnational capitalist class of bankers and corporate managers speculates on human lives and profits from deathworlds,

You can disembark at the Shadipur Metro station in West Delhi and walk down or take a rickshaw through the bustling Shadi Khampur bazaar. At the end of the main bazaar road, you will find a cycle rickshaw stand. In this nook of a predominantly working-class neighbourhood is the building housing the May Day Bookstore-cum-LeftWord Office. Walk in through the bookstore's bright yellow painted doors stencilled with ‘8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, and 8 hours for books and coffee’ (see Image 8.1) to lose yourselves in rows of bookshelves. As the name suggests, LeftWord publishes and distributes books on a range of subjects broadly aligned with the left ideology, issues concerning working lives, and Marxist writings. You will also find books from other independent publishing houses such as Tulika, Zubaan, Kali, and Navayana. It is a space that hopes to impel people to act against tyranny, imagine another future. A space that chronicles another time, as Castillo inscribes – Before the scales, tomorrow.

If you run into Sudhanva Deshpande, managing editor of LeftWord, he will generously offer you a cup of coffee at the bookstore's coffee corner – a brief encounter with him and you sense his deep commitment to left politics. If you are lucky, you might be able to time your visit with a play staged next door at Studio Safdar, an independent art space established by the legendary political street theatre group Jana Natya Manch (Janam). If you head to the May Day Bookstore on 1 May, you will find a room full of artists, academics, students, a lot of music, and poetry.

Introduction

In the last twenty five years of neoliberal governance, India has witnessed a dramatic shift to privatisation and corporatisation. The new regime of governance has allowed accumulation of wealth for a few with an accompanying rise in inequity at an unprecedented scale. In this neoliberal era, discourse of management is exalted and allows a significant symbolic capital to accrue to managers. Such a discourse fosters conditions for managementality, or the the mentalities and rationalities of management, to determine subject positions that are economically and culturally privileged. While most people struggle for their survival, neoliberalism creates the condition for a small elite to become entrepreneurial, prudential and active to exploit the opportunities offered by corporatisation in a socially uneven India. As Neruda perceptively observed, the corporate-state nexus commodifies and sells everything to the highest bidder leaving the majority of the Indian population in a state of abject poverty. In such times of abundance for a few and deprivation for the vast majority, the question of alternative organisations becomes particularly relevant in India.

Our ideas of alternative organisations in this book are inspired by critical traditions in social and management theory to imagine a different world in which there are emphases on human emancipation, equity and justice. We believe academic writings create counter-discourses that may lead to conditions of what Neruda describes, ‘The day is coming when we will liberate’. Such conditions often hinge on the creation and dissemination of alternative imaginations that are repressed by dominant management discourses under neoliberalism.