Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature

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About the session: 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. Free Gifts 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, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. The book 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.

About the speaker: Alyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, where she works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in contemporary social and political thought. She is the author of Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton 2025) and the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019). 

If you would like to receive information about the speaker series, please email Catarina Neves at a.c.moiteirodasneves@uu.nl.