Racial Capitalism, Imperialism, and Negotiated Coordination

This essay responds to Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine’s application of the negotiated-coordination framework to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and climate crisis. It does so by contextualizing these crises in the light of capitalism’s racialized and imperialist history, thereby problematizing their use of Polanyi’s embeddedness framework and socialist democracy. Specifically, if the consequences of racial capitalism and imperialism are not actively addressed, the economic will be subordinated to social and political institutions that retain their racialized and imperialist character. The essay thus explores the consequences of the dispossession of racialized people and of the Global South in the context of the pandemic and the climate crisis, concretizing and illustrating those concerns and concluding that a system of negotiated coordination limited to stakeholder democracy is insufficient. Instead, this coordination must prioritize the needs and knowledge of racialized people and the Global South.