Capitalism and Confinement

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

We often describe capitalism as movement: flows of money, migrations of labor, cycles of production and consumption. From Marx’s “limitless chase” to David Harvey’s “flows” and Badiou’s “boundless quest,” the language of motion dominates our understanding of the system. But what if capitalism depends not only on movement, but on confinement?

Capitalism and Confinement reframes the history of accumulation through the enclosures, plantations, prisons, reservations, and domestic spaces that have bound land, labor, and life. By tracing how capitalism expands profit while restricting people, bodies, and territories, the book reveals confinement as a recurring strategy of domination—structurally central yet historically varied.

From the Middle Passage to the modern prison, from settler colonization to the nuclear family, this account dramatizes the connections between race, gender, and class that sustain capitalism’s power. At once theoretical and urgent, it bridges critical race studies, feminist thought, and prison abolition, insisting that to challenge capitalism is to confront its logics of confinement.Introduction: Capitalism and Confinement
Chapter One: Capitalism’s Slavery
Chapter Two: Wage Labor and the Price of Mobility
Chapter Three: Private Property and the Confinement of Land, Labor, and Life
Chapter Four: Collective Enclosure and the Capitalist Commons
Chapter Five: The Borders of Capitalism
Chapter Six: Policing Social Order
Chapter Seven: Beyond Carceral Solutions
Chapter Eight: The Carcerality of Care
Conclusion: Abolition Communism
EpilogueAshley J. Bohrer is a scholar-activist based in Chicago. Professionally, Bohrer is currently Assistant Professor of Gender and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, having completed a PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University (2016). In addition to academic work, Ashley is deeply involved in social movements for intersectional and anti-capitalist liberation. At the moment, most of that work is centered at Jewish Voice for Peace.