The Price of Freedom

Review of Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature

Jordan Daniels

August 19, 2025

http://doi.org/10.63478/I0MNZ7QQ

Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature

by Alyssa Battistoni

Princeton University Press

2025

In a world beset by interlinked ecological and political crises, Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature addresses two weighty questions: What is the nature of value, and what is the value of nature? Early political economists debated the role of natural agents in the production of wealth, but it was Marx—in his analysis of the way human labor generates value for capital—who articulated the peculiar appearance of nature under capitalism as a free gift. Battistoni follows through on this marginal insight in Marx’s critique of political economy. Although it might at first sound redundant or oxymoronic, she differentiates the free gift from the gifts of nature bestowed within the parameters of reciprocity and relational responsibilities (as Winona LaDuke and Robin Wall Kimmerer describe in Anishinaabe and Potawatomi societies) and from the object of a unidirectional act of divine grace characteristic of Western theological understandings of the natural world.¹ Where these notions of the gift signal exceptions to the realm of commercial exchange, the free gift is intelligible only in relation to the market—that is, to the sphere in which “most things have a price.”² What the free of the “free gift of nature” signals is the costlessness of materially useful nature under a capitalist organization of activities. The free gift of nature is therefore a phenomenon that appears only in a world structured around three defining features: the division of human beings into a class that owns the means of production and one forced to sell its labor, the generalized exchange of commodities, and our dependence upon the market as the primary means of acquiring the necessities of life. It is by following the vicissitudes of the free gift of nature, Battistoni argues, that we can track how capitalism consistently fails to value nonhuman nature and what that means for our collective political prospects.

Although one conclusion of this wonderful book is that nothing comes for free, Free Gifts is itself a gift for those in the environmental humanities, political theory, and feminist thought. Much early environmental thought focused on how harmful forms of anthropocentrism or the dualistic separation of the natural world from human society underwrite ecological degradation at various scales.³ Contemporary discussions in environmental ethics often drill down on new paradigms for moralizing individual and collective contributions to climate change or debate whether rich or poor countries should lead in bearing the costs of climate change.⁴ In Free Gifts, Battistoni attends to the structural and material conditions subtending many of these debates, arguing that “one of the densest sites of interaction between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ is in the material realm we call the economy” and that the free gift of nature illuminates the limitations of capital for valuing nonhuman nature, human labor, and reproductive work.⁵

Battistoni’s analysis is both fine-grained and expansive as she develops a conceptual framework for nature’s treatment in a world oriented by market logics. Free Gifts therefore begins with a careful formal examination of how forces, beings, and things enter into our economic relations. As the investigation moves through the factory, the home, and the very biosphere, the book also tracks the concrete ways physical and biological processes both resist easy incorporation into capital’s designs and inform material production processes. A powerful aspect of the text includes Battistoni’s engagement with economic and political thinkers as she traces the shortcomings of extant critical social theory for directly addressing the material, earthbound conditions of existence.

In addition, she ultimately argues that not only does capitalism threaten the conditions for human and more-than-human life, but it also limits human freedom. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of the inherent ambiguity of the human condition—we are historically and materially situated, and yet to be human is to determine our own values and projects—Battistoni develops an antifoundationalist critique of capitalism’s constraints on our embodied and emplaced collective ways of life. In overdetermining our relationships with the more-than-human world, capitalism limits the possibilities for living differently and for valuing nature as more than nothing.

Because the market is the principal realm where decisions about our material world are adjudicated, and because nonhumans cannot receive wages and participate, the nonhuman world is rendered structurally vulnerable in a way particular to capitalism.

Free Gifts engages with a remarkable range of interlocutors—from classical political economists to existentialists, social reproduction theorists, and various republican thinkers—and offers more rich and nuanced arguments than I can address here. That being said, I turn now to its central theoretical contribution, the free gift of nature, before unpacking some of the insights made possible by this timely conceptual lens.

The Free Gift

In the first chapter, Battistoni develops the foundations for what she calls the anthropocentrism of the wage. She does so by returning to Marx’s critique of political economy, where she unpacks the source of nature’s devaluation under the capitalist mode of production. Again, two of capitalism’s defining features are the classed division between capital and labor and, consequently, the wage: one class of people own the material means of production and have the means to acquire other inputs; another class of people own nothing but their labor, which they sell on the market as one such input. Human labor is marked by a few distinguishing qualities—it is relatively indeterminate and capable of being organized in complex and variable ways—but what underpins the wage in particular is the ability to sell one’s labor power without thereby selling oneself. It is this unique human ability to distinguish one’s labor from one’s “person” that enables the “free” labor characteristic of capitalism, as opposed to compulsory labor under slavery and serfdom. Where this capacity is required in order for a person to exchange their time and the use of their labor power for a monetized wage, it is the absence of this capacity that marks a meaningful difference between humans and nonhumans under capitalism. Natural agents are not capable of exchanging labor power for a wage and thus are “freely available by default.”⁶

The anthropocentrism of the wage therefore constitutes the nonhuman world as free gifts in two senses: First, figured as “wage labor’s opposite,” nature’s productive forces are integral but costless inputs for human production.⁷ Second, given the absence of human labor in their production, the gifts of nature offer material usefulness but lack exchange value. If nature’s productive forces are “wage labor’s opposite,” then nature’s products appear as costless corollaries to the commodity. Both are necessarily priced at zero and thereby rendered free gifts for the taking.

Battistoni’s analysis of the anthropocentrism of the wage supports the particular sense in which she argues that capitalism is a humanism. While some accuse Marx of anthropocentrism, Battistoni argues that it is capitalism that is structured around particularly human capacities, including the indeterminacy of human activity and the ability to exchange one’s labor for a wage while remaining (ambiguously) free. For Battistoni, there are cognitive differences between human and nonhuman entities, but these differences need not be as strict nor as hierarchical as they are under the capitalist organization of production. It is capitalism’s central logics of the wage, commodity exchange, class division, and market dependence that intensify these differences and ensure they are iterated through our actions by default.

Moreover, as Silvia Federici argued in her elaboration of the patriarchy of the wage (which Battistoni discusses in greater detail in Chapter Five), there are serious consequences for those who are excluded from receiving a wage.⁸ As Federici and other Marxist feminists have demonstrated, capitalism’s reorganization of activities along gendered lines instantiated a novel iteration of patriarchy. Men’s work (oriented towards production for market) merited compensation for its role in producing value, and women’s labor (forcefully restricted to reproducing life and care work) was obfuscated as labor and either under- or uncompensated. Even though wage labor amounts to the expropriation of value from the worker, those who receive wages are able to participate in the economy and acquire what they need to live while expressing “preferences” through the market. They are also able engage in social life as structured under capitalism, which is largely mediated by currency. Even while performing essential activities for the community or family, those who are excluded from waged work are made dependent on those who earn wages and have few avenues for either acting on or expressing their interests.

Where Federici argues that women’s work ought to be waged and thus recognized as work, the work of nonhuman agents cannot be. Again, the wage under capitalism—its ideal form of labor—constitutively excludes nonhuman nature. Because the market is the principal realm where decisions about our material world are adjudicated, and because nonhumans cannot receive wages and participate, the nonhuman world is rendered structurally vulnerable in a way particular to capitalism: “An orangutan, for example, cannot outbid palm oil producers to preserve the Indonesian rainforest as a home rather than a plantation.”⁹ When such decisions are left to the market, the orangutan and other inhabitants of the rainforest are totally dependent “on human beings who value the rainforest and are willing to pay to preserve it.”

[Battistoni's] concept of the free gift demands we move beyond questions of responsibility in consumption and instead think through the structural forces driving both consumption and production…

Battistoni describes her theory of the free gift of nature in terms of what philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel describes as a “real abstraction”—that is, a concept that structures action without conscious intent. Real abstractions emerge from the ubiquity of certain actions, and the most basic action for a society oriented around the commodity is exchange. What Battistoni notes here is that, irrespective of one’s ideas concerning nature, it is nearly impossible to abstain from purchasing the things one needs to live under capitalism. In spite of whatever kindly sentiments one has, our actions in that realm of exchange—buying a pair of jeans, filling up one’s car with gas—effectively value nature at nothing and, importantly, do so for reasons internal to the ostensibly nonviolent features of capitalism. While many critics of capitalism (including Marx himself) emphasize capital’s bloody expropriation of land and resources, Battistoni argues that nature’s devaluation does not rely on a temporally or logically prior moment of violence or extraction. Moreover, she argues that nature’s devaluation does not rely on the warping effects of ideology, a claim she attributes to a large swathe of ecological thinkers under the umbrella of the “worldview approach.”¹⁰ Instead of emerging through the “extra-economic” processes of violence or ideology, the free gift of nature results from the mechanisms of valuation internal to economic processes themselves. Battistoni’s approach is thus a formal but materialist critique of the social relations we live every day and their consequences for the nonhuman world.

The normative power of Battistoni’s critique comes from an unexpected but welcome corner. Having developed the analytical resource of the free gift, in Chapter Two Battistoni argues that capitalism’s system of valuation is a bad one because it limits human freedom. Drawing upon the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, freedom for Battistoni “consists in the possibility of choosing to be other than what we are, and taking responsibility for what we decide.”¹¹ Contrary to its defenders, capitalism does not “allow us to decide for ourselves what is in our own interest and pursue it to the best of our ability” via the freedom of the market.¹² Capitalism perverts and constrains freedom because class rule and market imperatives overdetermine the field of action and limit possible human projects.

For Battistoni, class rule describes how private ownership facilitates the rule of the few over many: “private control over production and investment means that decisions made by a tiny fraction of people—themselves subject to the competitive pressure of the market—fundamentally shape the world in which the rest of us live.” Moreover, market dependence (that one must purchase what one needs to live) and market competition (that one is always competing with other producers) fundamentally constrain the ability of a person to make decisions that reflect their own values. Obedience to these rules of the market severely compromises the range of possibilities that one might choose, whereas “[t]o be human, for Sartre and Beauvoir, is to be faced with a choice about how to be; to even be able to conceive of such a choice.”¹³ Battistoni’s critique is especially salient in relation to the nonhuman world because capitalism prices most nonhuman nature at zero.

Battistoni’s account of the free gift of nature, class rule, and market rule therefore offers a powerful formal challenge to contemporary environmental ethicists and economists who believe climate change can be resolved through the mechanisms of capital. Her concept of the free gift demands we move beyond questions of responsibility in consumption and instead think through the structural forces driving both consumption and production, which directs the focus in subsequent chapters to nature-based sectors that resist mechanization, for instance, as well as possible legal infrastructures for collective organizing around ecological harms. I turn to these in greater detail now.

Material Issues and Political Matters

While Free Gifts’ first two chapters lay out the theoretical underpinnings of capitalism’s defining social institutions—the wage, the exchange of commodities, market competition, and the free gift of nature—the analysis in the following chapters grounds itself in and around the factory as a center of production, the bodies and ambient surroundings exposed to production’s byproducts, the household as domain of reproductive labor, and the biosphere that produces the conditions for life. The conceptual key of the “free gift” unlocks sites of political contestation in each of these interrelated spheres, affording greater clarity for what might be taken up as collective projects.

In the third chapter, Battistoni contrasts capital’s rationalization of productive human and nonhuman elements within the factory to the abdication of control over production in nature-based sectors. Anna Tsing’s famous discussion of matsutake pickers and the enduring figure of the small farmer or rancher are often romanticized as standing outside of capitalism.¹⁴ As such, they appear to offer visions of life and production ordered differently. Battistoni challenges this view, affirming that such producers are still integrally linked to capitalism’s networks via reliance on brokers with monopsonic power, on wealthy consumers of their specialty goods and global markets, and on banks’ inflated credit rates. Rather than exceptions, these sectors exemplify a specific linkage of capital, labor, and nature: capital abdicates intervention in the production process where “nature is unreliable, such that investment is risky,” but comes to collect at other moments in the accumulation process.¹⁵Given that capitalism structures even the sites of production that appear to stand outside of it, Battistoni thinks through some ways that workers in these sectors—such as those in the fishing industry in the 1940s and 50s on the US West Coast—might organize to the advantage of both labor and the ecosystems they rely on.

While there is much Battistoni admires about [the radical feminists'] intervention, she argues that it lacks a strong account of the mechanisms that render nature free for the taking in the first place and offers tautological explanations for how gender ideology relates to devalued reproductive work. Again challenging the causal force of ideology…Battistoni provides an alternative account for the low value of reproductive labor…

In Chapter Four, Battistoni explores pollution as one form of the social costs enabled by the free gift of nature. Through a detailed discussion of the economic concept of the externality—which names the phenomenon whereby costs for third parties are not reflected in the prices of economic activity—she helpfully supplements debates in environmental ethics and environmental justice. Popular concepts like Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” and Engels’s “social murder” are both illuminating and galvanizing, but they may obfuscate the structural role of production and the outsized power of market rule on the transformation of the material world under capitalism.¹⁶ Beginning with the theoretical origins of the concept in the work of economists Arthur Pigou and Ronald Coase, Battistoni unpacks externalities as central to “how markets are supposed to work,” rather than signals of “market failure.”¹⁷ Where economists suggest that state or market-mediated payments might allow producers to effectively settle up, Battistoni argues that such attempts at compensation will follow the familiar grooves of social relations organized under class power and coercively underpay, thus reiterating “the inequalities and vulnerabilities that permeate class society” along the lines of race and nation.¹⁸ Battistoni usefully frames the human bodily capacity for exposure to noxious environments as human absorption power, a passive corollary to labor power. Absorption power thereby functions as a free gift of nature; the constitutive passivity of exposure “renders the contract unnecessary.”¹⁹ Social costs typically only designate human losses, but Battistoni subtly stretches the concept to frame the catastrophic harms and monetarily incalculable costs for nonhuman entities and ecosystems.

Instead of market solutions to the problem of externalized social costs, Battistoni gestures toward the possibility of new collectives that might emerge and organize against the producers of pollution, a kind of “union of the affected.”²⁰ In a section that is promising though undeveloped, Battistoni suggests that Christopher Stone’s argument for the legal rights of natural entities might provide the political infrastructure for “multispecies collective bargaining.”²¹ Although Battistoni notes the complexity of the matter in a footnote, this is one site where more connections to Indigenous-led efforts would be especially fruitful. In 2016 in Colombia, the Constitutional Court declared the Atrato River basin and its tributaries legal persons on the basis of the biocultural rights of the Indigenous and Afro-descendent ethnic communities living there. After 140 years of negotiation, in 2017 the Māori tribe of Whanganui in the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand won state recognition of Te Awa Tupua, otherwise known as the Whanganui River, as a legal person. In 2019 in California, the Yurok tribe conferred the status of legal person on the Klamath River, five years before the unprecedented removal of four privately-owned hydroelectric dams from the river. These cases are all instructive regarding their specific approaches to countering colonial and ecological injustice, the novel political alliances fostered therein, and also the limitations of the “rights of nature” under certain political-economic and legal conditions (including scarce material resources and corrupt or hostile legal institutions).²² Fittingly, perhaps, Battistoni ends the chapter with a provocative challenge, especially in light of contemporary debates over nuclear energy: to understand pollution as a political question beyond market rule does not “prohibit any activity outright, even those with potentially harmful byproducts or effects. It poses a more foundational question for us to answer: what might pollution even be in a society ordered by something other that price?”²³

In Chapter Five, Battistoni brings the concept of the free gifts of nature to bear on a central claim in Marxist-feminist literature regarding the devaluation of reproductive labor and the oppression of women under capitalism. In particular, she focuses on the Wages for Housework movement and what she calls Silvia Federici’s “naturalization thesis.” Federici’s basic argument is that reproductive labor has been rendered a “natural resource” by patriarchal-capitalist ideology, and Battistoni teases out the implicit claim that this mystification accounts for society’s unquestioned entitlement to women’s domestic, emotional, and psychological labor without material recompense. The radical feminists’ demand for wages for housework means to break the illusion that renders women’s work a free gift of nature while also, Battistoni emphasizes, challenging the wage itself as adequately valuing labor.

While there is much Battistoni admires about this intervention, she argues that it lacks a strong account of the mechanisms that render nature free for the taking in the first place and offers tautological explanations for how gender ideology relates to devalued reproductive work. Again challenging the causal force of ideology (as in Chapter One), Battistoni provides an alternative account for the low value of reproductive labor via economist Wiliam Baumol’s analysis of “cost disease.” Baumol’s concept names the disparity between the productivity gains of technologically-advancing manufacturing and the relatively stagnant productivity of service sector roles. These service jobs involve human interactions, attention, and temporal durées that resist automation, and the costs of these services rise in relation to the falling costs of goods (even when wages are kept low in these sectors in attempts to minimize production costs). Battistoni suggests that reproductive labor resists automation, industrialization, and optimization in a manner similar to the stagnant service sectors. As such, capital abdicates reproductive labor, with a few exceptions for the areas that might be made profitable through optimization (such as fast food). Battistoni means to reframe the question of women’s work via analysis of the object of labor rather than the subject of labor: reproductive work, which attends to biological and physical processes the resist optimization, is not profitable for capital. When capital abandons the reproduction of labor power, it falls on other agents, such as the family. Battistoni thus argues that the household is “a remnant of capitalism’s reorganization of production; a space abdicated by capital but fully internal to capitalism.”²⁴ Patriarchal domination in the family would thus play out “downstream from market rule.”²⁵

It is a virtue of Battistoni’s book that the beauty of her theoretical analysis is never comforting for very long. The frustrations and promise of the political are incorporated in the warp and woof of the text.

Providing an exhaustive account of patriarchy is notably not Battistoni’s primary aim here. Again, speaking to the narrow subject of reproductive labor, she wants to move beyond the “worldview approach” that vests ideology with strong causal powers over capital’s own internal mechanisms of valuation. While this chapter does usefully clarify the economic forces directing gendered patterns of labor and care costs, it gives the nuanced accounts of gendered oppression and women’s restriction to unwaged reproductive roles in the work of Carolyn Merchant, Val Plumwood, and Silvia Federici surprisingly short shrift. Battistoni’s formal analysis of reproductive work’s undervaluation under capitalism fruitfully supplements but doesn’t replace the authors’ detailed accounts of how the laboring class was fractured in early capitalism via legal mandate, guild ordinance, and violence.²⁶ Their genealogical work sheds light on the way state and private institutions can be used to reinforce gendered roles (especially in relation to reproductive rights), which are also ongoing sites of political contestation. The chapter does, however, end on a critical challenge: capitalism is not capable of valuing the lifemaking activities that we might actually regard as valuable, so why limit ourselves to that structure of evaluation?

In Chapter Six, Battistoni explores approaches to thinking “natural capital” and argues for understanding ecosystems as infrastructures. She positions the insights of pricing nature against common laments over the commodification of nature. Critics of commodification who decry pricing nature—voicing the moral objection that nature is beyond price—fail to face the central problem for capitalism’s profit-oriented logic: it is nature’s costlessness that underwrites the status quo, and it is capitalism’s abdication of ecological systems and uncharismatic creatures that spell catastrophe for the nonhuman world. She describes the projects of economically pricing ecosystem functions—$125 trillion for the entire biosphere, $1 trillion for the world’s stock of whales—as akin to the demands of Wages for Housework. Economists posit the astronomical costs of human-produced alternatives to what is now freely taken from nature, while at the same time demonstrating the limitations of capitalist valuation as a whole.

Given these failures of the market and capitalist valuation in general, Battistoni again searches for the any “productive tension” that might betoken an alternative to the market’s monopoly on transforming the material world.²⁷ While the state typically serves capital, “doing things capital needs but can’t do for itself,” Battistoni points to the possibility that the state could regard ecological services as infrastructure and thus invest in its protection or cultivation. If ecological systems could be understood as public services that facilitate human activity (as well as that of the nonhuman beings internal to them!), this would justify the state’s investment not in natural capital but in “natural communia—the Latin term for property held by all.”²⁸

Of course, nothing is guaranteed when ecosystems are regarded as political concerns: as public services, ecosystem services are open to “public and political contestation.”²⁹ Given the current condition of electoral politics, it is very difficult to imagine how the inventive and effective political organizing at local levels can translate to regional, national, or international politics necessary for the scale of intervention demanded by our changing climate. Battistoni stops short of pitching a political program like Climate Leninism and the development of a party, for which Jodi Dean and Kai Heron argue in Spectre, or intelligent sabotage, as Andreas Malm considers.³⁰ She’s also unfazed by the potential objection that nonhumans would still have no direct voice in these political debates.

Leaving aside the difficult question of precisely how to redirect the state away from serving capital, Battistoni concludes the book with a nuanced defense of Beauvoirian freedom. Human freedom is ambiguous because we are both embodied and transcendent beings, and political theories of freedom must account for the material aspects of our existence alongside freedom from social domination. We are thrown into a world that “compel[s] us to treat nature as a free gift” and “limits our ability to act on our judgments about what would constitute appropriate, respectful, or reciprocal relationships to nonhuman nature,” but to be human is to be able to choose in the face of our situation, the concrete conditions of the world as they are given to us.³¹

Free Gifts is a deeply rewarding (and worrying) perspective on our ecological and political situation. It does not offer answers to all of the problems it names. Battistoni closes the book with Simone de Beauvoir’s memorable admission in the Ethics of Ambiguity: “I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliothèque National in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under the show of the infinite, was the consolations of death, and I again wanted to live in the midst of men.”³² It is a virtue of Battistoni’s book that the beauty of her theoretical analysis is never comforting for very long. The frustrations and promise of the political are incorporated in the warp and woof of the text. In lieu of any direct imperatives or any guarantees, the book has recovered promising sites where political claims already exceed easy divisions of the world into simply human or natural affairs. I very much look forward to the life of this book as it enters our midst.

Ecosocialism, Feminism, Marxist Theory

Jordan Daniels

Jordan Daniels is Assistant Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College in Claremont, CA on unceded Gabrielino/Tongva territory, Tovaangar. She earned her PhD. in Philosophy from Emory University. Jordan works at the intersection of environmental philosophy, critical theory, and feminist thought, with abiding commitments to decolonial theory and aesthetics.

The Price of Freedom

Review of Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature

Jordan Daniels

The Free Gift

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The Price of Freedom

Review of Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature

Jordan Daniels

The Free Gift

Material Issues and Political Matters

SHARE

The Continuing Relevance of Marx’s Capital

Queer Is Total, Baby!

Contest the Space of Politics

HELLO, COMRADE

NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DETAILS?

Support our Work

Gift Subscriptions, Renewals, and More