Review of Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton, 2025).

Marxist philosophy is perennial in part because it ever blooms in new ways. This has been especially true of work in Marxist ecology and environmental philosophy. 

For a long time the operative view was that Marx held to an essentially “Promethean” view of socialism that was anthropocentric the whole way down. Marxist humanists read Marx as describing how a wide spectrum of human capacities had been under-developed by capitalism, leaving plenty of people in the developed world one-dimensional and billions more on or past the threshold of absolute scarcity. With the transition to an ethically higher form of society, resources would be allocated more rationally to ensure the full development of each through and for all. Orthodox Marxists who pooh-poohed ethical considerations nonetheless insisted that the science of history showed how things were going to get better for mankind. Capitalist dynamism would technologically develop the forces of production, ensuring that abundance awaited when the time was right to expropriate the expropriators. Socialist and communist movements would seize the developed forces of production, and the intelligent management of society’s resources would replace the irrational anarchy of the market. 

Environmentalists charged that beneath the surface, these apparently different forms of Marxist radicalism shared with bourgeois thought an indifference to nature. Whether in normative humanist or descriptive “scientific” form, socialist analysis assumed the primacy of the human. Left-wing critics like Russell Means pointed to this as an example of how thoroughly Marx remained within the paradigm of Western, colonial, and acquisitive thought. Right-wing critics like Martin Heidegger and his disciples charged that Marxist socialism and liberal capitalism were “metaphysically the same” in framing the natural world as nothing but a “standing reserve” to be manipulated for human purposes. Through the twentieth century these charges gained enormous currency. It became clear that the states with “real existing socialism”, like the petro-driven Soviet Union, had appalling environmental records. 

Capitalism vs. Nature

Things have changed a lot since then. Part of the Marxist resurgence in the twenty-first century has been to criticize the interpretation of Marx as an anthropocentric Promethean who saw nature as a “free gift” to be exploited in a nominally exploitation-free socialist society. Books like John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology demonstrated that Marx was deeply sensitive to developments in the natural and biological sciences and tried to incorporate them into his work. Marx stressed the “metabolic” relationship between human beings and nature and how a “rift” was emerging and worsening under capitalism, which developed the forces of production at the price of potentially irreparable ecological damage.

Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature is an original contribution to this blossoming genre. Less a work of Marxology than a philosophical contribution from within the tradition, the first major “project” of Battistoni’s book is to show how capitalism is the “driving force of contemporary ecological transformation.” Aware that this invites charges of reductionism, Battistoni defends her thesis by insisting that “one of the densest sites of interaction between nature and politics is in the material reality we call the economy.” Since capitalism is “the political-economic system upon which nearly all human beings now rely for our livelihoods,” the emphasis is warranted. One way of avoiding a narrowness of subject matter is to conceptualize capitalism very broadly—as without an “inside or outside,” or a “background and foreground.” For Battistoni there can be no risk of conceptual reductionism in framing capitalism as the driving force of ecological transformation precisely because capitalism has permeated every other social site and space. The material reality of capitalism as an expansive mode of production that relentlessly incorporates everything else has resolutely caught up with the classical Marxist emphasis on economic primacy.

In Free Gifts’ most fascinating chapter, “No Such Thing As A Free Gift”, Battistoni dissects the literature on the titular “free gifts” of nature. She describes how pro-capitalist economists and even moderate critics have struggled and largely failed to incorporate a robust ecological perspective into their analysis. Much of this comes down to ideological motivations and limitations. The British welfare economist Arthur Pigou tried to take a modest step forward by theorizing how one of the negative externalities produced by industrial capitalism was enormous amounts of pollution in the city of London. This was a clear example of how “the pursuit of private wealth tended to diminish public welfare rather than increasing it.” Pigou proposed intelligent state intervention to rectify the disparity, though he left much of the underlying ontological assumptions of bourgeois economy untouched.

Even this was a step too far for neoliberal economists and philosophers. Battistoni acknowledges that the most deep-thinking neoliberals and libertarians, like Hayek and Nozick, were willing to contemplate exceptions to market hagiography and tried to correct for them through rethinking and applying market logics. But by and large pro-capitalist thinkers were abjectly wedded to the “optimistic view” that systemic market failure ought not to be possible, and so it was in fact not possible. And when it turned out their optimism was unfounded, they responded by doubling down on the insistence that market mechanisms would solve the problem, like an addict swearing they only need one more hit to get clean.

Inspired by apologists like Ronald Coase, neoliberals insisted pollution and ecological damage needed to be governed by the logic of commodity exchange. If people wanted to pay to pollute or offshore toxic waste to the developing world, that was a choice market actors needed to be “free” to make. But the choice of rejecting the capitalist paradigm as a whole, or even in part, never came into question. This reflected 

the vision of markets that had become prominent in the late twentieth century, which had banished measures of social welfare except insofar as it shakes out in competitive markets…. It reflected, too, the basic principles of market freedom as articulated by Hayek: that people should be able to choose what level of pollution they are willing to tolerate. Treating the right to pollute as a commodity would simply allow people to make choices that more accurately reflected how much they valued clean air or quiet.

Battistoni’s analysis in this chapter echoes and draws on much of the recent literature on neoliberalism. Critics like Wendy Brown and David Harvey show that while capitalism previously sought to insulate the market from civil society, neoliberalism offensively strives to incorporate civil society itself into the market. This is coupled with defensive efforts to encase the market from whatever residual democratic pressures still might emerge from civil society. What Battistoni contributes is a careful analysis of how the same market logics have been extended to assimilate nature itself, which was granted little ontological or normative status outside existing as a free gift to be exploited for human purposes. 

Freedom In and Through Nature 

The Marxist analysis just described isn’t entirely novel, but it is lucid. Battistoni effectively reacquaints her readers with the myriad ways capitalism has distorted our metabolic relationship to nature. In this respect she pulls off her first “project” of critiquing capitalist political economy from an eco-socialist perspective admirably. 

Her second project is more ambitious. Battistoni argues that when one diagnoses “the free gift as a distinctively capitalist social form”, one shows “that this is not a necessary relationship to nature, and therefore [opens] the space for politics.” The goal is to demonstrate how capitalism’s distortions of our relationship to nature imposes limitations on human freedom. To do so Battistoni draws on an immense array of philosophical sources: Marxist and discourse-theoretic feminism, left-republicanism, and the existentialism of De Beauvoir and Sartre. Much of the material in these sections is less systematically integrated with the material on political economy and the environment than one would hope. This is unusual, given the high level of systematicity displayed in Battistoni’s influences: Marx, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Clare Roberts are notably architectonic thinkers.

Part of the problem is the sheer scale of the task Battistoni has set for herself. There are plenty of pearls of insight throughout. In one chapter she draws on the feminist literature on social reproduction to rethink foundational problems at the ontological level. Battistoni notes how, by and large, contemporary feminists have resolutely socialized and denaturalized gender relations around reproduction. This was part of a heroic effort to demonstrate how naturalizing women’s labor on the basis of their reproductive capacities ascribed a false metaphysical necessity to mom doing the laundry while replicating patriarchal social structures. Battistoni is sympathetic to these feminist efforts but radically insists that in 

seeking to denaturalize “women’s work” they take for granted that defining people or activities “into nature” means they can be freely appropriated, while rarely asking why nature itself is treated this way. These analyses therefore leave intact the underlying division between the free gifts of nature and value-producing human labor, and leave the status of nature within capitalism unchallenged. At the same time, the distinctively physical elements of reproducing human life tend to receive short shrift in accounts of “social reproduction.” Although theories of reproductive labor often invoke “life making,” and loosely describe associated tasks, they rarely address the particularities of life processes themselves.

In other words Battistoni rejects the tendency common to liberals and many post-structuralists to address reproduction, labor, and women’s biology in almost exclusively “discursive terms.” Unstated there is a smidge of the old Marxist critique of discourse theorists as closet idealists. By resisting treating women as material, biological objects, feminists may have erred too much on the side of insisting on them as subjects capable of limitless self-definition. The feminist critique thus shifts too much away from the materiality of the body and life, which always pose generative limitations and opportunities on human life. These theoretical errors pose significant barriers to thinking through a more emancipatory reorganization of reproduction along more rational, socialist lines. Such a reorganization is urgently needed: Battistoni caustically notes how “reproduction within capitalist societies” tends “to be a cobbled together patchwork of public and private, household and market, childcare provided by family members and babysitting by electronics, meals from fast food restaurants and undocumented nanny pay under the table.”

I by and large agree with Battistoni on these points, and think her discussion of feminist issues and social reproduction is illuminating and insightful. It offers material to critique contemporary feminism as far too symbolically minded—operating at a cultural and ideational level while leaving the material bases of women’s exploitation largely intact. Battistoni doesn’t go this far, but I’d suggest this demonstrates the class-situatedness of too much academic feminist thought. On the other hand Battinstoni demonstrates once more how crucial a feminist dimension is to socialist theorizing about foundational issues in an original and comprehensive way; something which shouldn’t have to be stressed in 2025 but must be.

Where’s the Politics?

Battistoni covers a lot of ground in the book, and ostensibly it’s all tied together by that capacious understanding of “capitalism.” But the expansive array of interventions makes it unclear how the material on freedom systematically fits in with the first project of critiquing capitalist political economy’s treatment of nature. There is a symmetry in how it assumes women’s labor as a “free gift” of their maternal nature: Battistoni notes how reproductive labor as “much as agriculture, is a nature-base sector-which is not to say that it is natural-and the disparities between biophysical processes and patterns of capital accumulation that present obstacles to the capitalization of agriculture are present, too, in the reproduction of human life.” Capitalism runs up against the limitations of the planet much as it runs up against the limitations of humanity to endlessly reproduce given bodily cycles, the long-term vulnerability of human infants, menopause, etc. But this symmetry is more observed than unpacked, and would probably only be satisfactorily explored if Battistoni explained how a feminist democratic socialism of freedom could manage these issues more rationally and effectively.

This brings me to one of my core frustrations: for all its insistence on the freedom that would come from politicizing nature, Free Gifts often reads as a strangely apolitical book. By the conclusion it remained unclear to me how a democratic socialist approach to the environment would be less ecologically damaging than the alternative, and it is even more unclear how reconfiguring our metabolic relationship to nature would be emancipatory beyond the first step of licensing us to ask these kinds of politicizing questions. This is a vital first step in tearing off the ideological veil, but at some point a materialist project should commit itself to a more concrete set of aspirations and prescriptions. 

Here the lack of a constructive dimension limits the book’s ability to gel everything together into a singular whole. There is a longstanding Marxist wariness about offering expansive constructive visions: doing so risks indulging in speculative ideal theory—writing the infamous recipe books for the cook shops of the future. To an extent this is an admirable piece of self-constraint. But the problem is that too much wariness about offering a constructive vision means assertions about how the politicization of nature and the ideological unmasking of naturalization feel strangely neutered. The freedom promised is wholly abstract, a mere means, without a substantial sense of the ends and projects to which we’d commit ourselves in a new paradigm where the metabolic rift with nature was cured. As Alasdair MacIntyre noted as far back as After Virtue, this is a perennial problem in Marxism, which focuses a great deal on how to achieve emancipation and not nearly enough on what emancipation will look like and why it will be good. 

Also lacking is any sense of what kind of institutions, practices, and relations of production would appear. Here a point of contrast might be helpful: Battistoni dedicates considerable time to analyzing the left-republican tradition revitalized in works like William Clare Robert’s Marx’s Inferno or more recently Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx. While sympathetic to many of its aspirations, Battistoni offers compelling criticisms of the left-republican tradition. She claims they focus too narrowly on sites of emancipation like the workplace. While narrowly helpful, in Battistoni’s view, left-republicanism fails to ask more foundational questions about the capitalist mode of production as a whole and its metabolic relationship with nature. This is true, but that narrowness has also enabled left-republicanism to be generative of a clear project. I’d go so far as to say its combination of ambition and focus is a model for emulation. Debates about workplace democracy and ending private government are sufficiently tangible that they’ve entered into the public sphere and have begun to frame debates. This is just what is needed to help hegemonically shift things in a left direction. By contrast, after reading Free Gifts, it remained unclear to me where the freedom to politically rethink our relationship to nature would concretely lead us.  

Nevertheless, 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. That it feels like a preparatory step towards a more thoroughly systematic project isn’t a knock, but a request for more.

Matt McManus is an incoming Assistant Professor at Spelman College and the author of The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism amongst other books.