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," dives into capitalism's failure to properly value nature. She critiques how certain aspects of the natural world are commodified while others, essential for ecological balance, are ignored. Battistoni discusses contemporary issues like pollution and reproductive labor, revealing how capitalism exploits these elements. Her thought-provoking insights challenge listeners to reconsider ecological values and emphasize the need for meaningful political intervention to protect our environment.

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INSIGHT

Nature As Capitalism's 'Free Gift'

Capitalism often treats large swaths of nature as a "free gift" rather than commodifying them.
That free-gift status is rooted in how capitalism commodifies human labor, creating a human/nonhuman divide.

INSIGHT

Abandonment As An Accumulation Strategy

Many things resist becoming commodities because material qualities block full capitalist subsumption.
Capital both appropriates and abandons matter, making expulsion a core accumulation strategy.

INSIGHT

Pollution As Classed Cost Shifting

Pollution reveals that costs of production are shifted onto those with the least power.
Class power shapes who absorbs toxic 'surplus matter' rather than market choice alone.

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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.

Alyssa Battistoni is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College in New York City

Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP)

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