Free Gifts - by Alyssa Battistoni Hardcover

About the Book

"In this book, political theorist Alyssa Battistoni offers a new theory of capitalism's treatment of nature that can help us understand our current ecological crisis. While capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification, Battistoni posits that capitalism also consistently and crucially fails to commodify vital aspects of the non-human world. This failure to value nature is pervasive, from causing costless carbon emissions to damaging priceless ecosystems"--

Book Synopsis

A timely new critique of capitalism's persistent failure to value nature

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.

Review Quotes

"[Free Gifts] is not only a remarkable synthesis of a variety of literatures on the environment, climate change, work, Karl Marx, feminism, and the politics of care . . . but also a brilliant intervention in these debates. It has given me all sorts of new ways to think about the connections between how we treat the environment and how we treat the world of childcare, eldercare, and the household; between economic accounts of negative externalities and Baumol's cost disease; Marx's view of nature; and more. It's a model of what political theory should be."---Corey Robin, Jacobin

"[Free Gifts] is a book for deep thinkers, who wish to delve into the ideas that have formed our society and are now remaking the physical planet we live on."---Jan Lee, Earth.org

"Gratifying. . . A powerful work of theory, [Free Gifts] is a text that simultaneously resists being reduced into programmatic form yet offers vital insights for regrouping in the daunting months and years ahead."---Amna Akbar, LPE Blog

"Free Gifts is an incisive critique of both mainstream and heterodox approaches to the political economy of climate change, as well as a state-of-the-art conspectus of contemporary critical theory. . . . Battistoni avoids the mistake of tendering an abstract and formulaic answer to the question of what is to be done; we can look to actual struggles taking place right now for inspiration and instruction. And her emphasis on freedom--and the conditions that make the exercise of freedom possible and meaningful--is not only refreshing but necessary."---Rob Hunter, LPE Blog

"Free Gifts succeeds at the rare accomplishment of not just asking the right questions and answering them convincingly, but of also spurring a whole series of further questions left for us all to reckon with as we stare deeper down the abyss. This spectacular book should be mandatory reading for students . . . while substantively carrying forward the project of the critique of political economy in our cursed era of genocide and ecological catastrophe."---Lukas Slothuus, Contemporary Political Theory

"[Free Gifts'] bold aim is to reintegrate nature into politics and economics and it is undoubtedly a powerful gesture in that direction. It is a valuable and generative addition to the burgeoning literature of Marxist ecology. In the most real sense it strives to restore the non-human world to its rightful place at the centre of human existence, and to imagine a place where humans have the freedom to value nature."---Henry Bell, Morning Star

"Battistoni's book is one of the most worthwhile to have been published in the planetary turn, and it carries great relevance for readers across many academic fields. Despite its deep theoretical engagements with highly specialized literatures, Free Gifts is also written in impressively clear prose. Battistoni's combination of political theory with a historicization of the intellectual underpinnings of the dominating climate framework is also highly engaging as intellectual history."---Julia Nordblad, Modern Intellectual History

"Brilliant. . . . [A]s a guide to many of the most important issues in political philosophy this book is worth careful study. Each chapter builds on previous chapters to present a coherent and compelling vision."---Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance

"A book that I absolutely love. It was a joy cover-to-cover, so thought-provoking, so many ideas. I just describe this book as political theory at its finest."---Jathan Sadowski, This Machine Kills

"Free Gifts offers an exceptional intellectual contribution in times of crisis, arming us with a deeper understanding of capitalism's logic in the Anthropocene era. It reveals that environmental destruction is not merely an 'external cost, ' but a direct consequence of the way capitalism generates value--by ignoring everything that cannot be subordinated to the wage relationship. . . . [An] essential intellectual tool for anyone seeking to understand a world being devoured by capitalism--and to change it toward a future grounded in genuine freedom and responsibility toward our planet and the fragile forms of life we share it with."---Said Mohammad, Al-Akhbar

"A truly wonderful book. . . . It's a very thorough reconstruction of how capitalism operates, generally and in relation to nature. . . . It's enormously erudite, incredibly wide-ranging in its readings. It's written in a lively prose. . . . . It's developing, in my view, a very original synthesis of value form analysis and existential philosophy that I haven't seen before. . . . [and] it also is very conceptually creative and comes up with concepts that I find very useful. . . . This is the most important work in ecological Marxism in a very long time."---Andreas Malm, Historical Materialism

"Free Gifts is itself a gift for those in the environmental humanities, political theory, and feminist thought. . . . [and] a deeply rewarding (and worrying) perspective on our ecological and political situation. . . . I very much look forward to the life of this book as it enters our midst."---Jordan Daniels, Spectre

"A remarkable, important work of sophisticated Marxist theory informed by spectacularly detailed analysis of our actually-existing capitalist world--and beautifully written at that. It's about nature but also everything."---Daniel Denvir

"[A] stimulating treatise. . . . Battistoni is a rigorous and skilled polemicist; she showcases her original close readings of classic texts without veering too far into the weeds. Her investigation adds up to a fascinating look at how a 'free' nature functions, ironically, to restrict human freedom to make ethical and socially responsible decisions. . . . [An] insightful theoretical approach to the climate crisis."-- "Publishers Weekly"

"An original contribution. . . . I have nothing but admiration for the ambition on display in Battistoni's work. Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature is appropriately a book that is very much alive."---Matt McManus, Damage

"I love this book. It's a great analysis of one of capitalism's core assumptions. . . . Super thought-provoking and wide-ranging."---Jeffrey Church, The Political Theory Review

About the Author

Alyssa Battistoni is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Boston Review, n+1, Dissent, The New Statesman, Jacobin, and New Left Review.