Capitalism and Confinement

Capitalism thrives on motion-but its power is built on the confinement of land, labor, and life.

Capitalism thrives on motion—but its power is built on the confinement of land, labor, and life.

Capitalism might appear as a system of movement: goods, capital, and people move around the world more than ever before. But capitalism’s voracious expansion violently imposes confinement at every turn as border walls, prisons, police, and property lines prevent us from moving. Even the wage, the state, and social reproduction constrict the lives we are able to pursue. Capitalism and Confinement offers a theory as to why confinement seems to be intensifying over time, who profits, and what we can do about it.

Tracing global capitalism’s pursuit of profit through restrictions on people, social movements, and territories, Bohrer reveals confinement to be a recurring strategy of domination—structurally central and historically varied. From the Middle Passage to the modern prison, from settler colonialism to the nuclear family, this account bridges theories of racial capitalism, feminism, and abolition to dramatize the connections between race, gender, and class that sustain capitalism’s power. Using theory, personal narrative, and decades of organizing, this book shows that challenging capitalism requires confronting its logics of confinement and struggling for their total abolition.