Vaccinating capitalism: racialised value in the COVID-19 economy

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the concept of necropolitics and its usefulness for understanding the state response to COVID-19, and its unequal political and economic consequences. Focusing on the British state, the paper seeks to explore and explain the dominant forms of government intervention and regulation that sought to ameliorate the crisis and shows how this response was shaped by a set of racialised capitalist social relations. The article argues that whilst the concept allows us to grasp the racialised vulnerability to death contained within the COVID-19 response, this needs to be understood within the wider context of the extraction of value in three key instances: firstly, in terms of creating a regime that would protect corporate autonomy; secondly, in terms of a racialised division of labour within states and finally in the context of a global imperialism which marginalises and racialises those states outside of the imperial core. It uses those three instances to explore how racist necropolitics is always underpinned processes of value-in-motion that maintain corporate profitability.