Alyssa Battistoni, "Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Aug 18, 2025

Alyssa Battistoni, author of "Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature," explores how capitalism often overlooks the value of nature. She critiques economic frameworks shaping climate politics and argues for a deeper understanding of ecological issues. Battistoni connects pollution, labor, and capitalist structures, emphasizing the need for responsibility towards environmental resources. Through revisiting historical thinkers, she advocates for reimagining nature's value and challenges traditional narratives surrounding capitalist exploitation and labor.

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INSIGHT

Nature As A Capitalist 'Free Gift'

Capitalism's default treatment of nature is as a "free gift" rather than pure generosity, shaped by wage-mediated human relations.
This social form makes many ecological contributions invisible to markets and policy debates.

INSIGHT

Abandonment As An Accumulation Strategy

Material qualities of labor processes block full capitalist subsumption and create zones capital abandons or expels.
Abandonment and expulsion are strategic features, not failures, shaping what capital values and leaves free.

INSIGHT

Commercial Subsumption In Nature Sectors

In nature-based sectors capital often controls via exchange and supply chains rather than direct supervision.
'Commercial subsumption' ties small producers into capitalism through market power and state-backed coercion.

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Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.
Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts.

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