Capitalism and the Politics of Nature with Alyssa Battistoni

A video of this November 16, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.

In her new book Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to place value on nature. She argues 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. Why have some things come to have value under capitalism—and why have others not. Recovering and reinterpreting classical economists’ idea of “free gifts of nature,” Battistoni builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. She 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 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.