Freedom in the Abstract

Free Gifts sets out to demonstrate how capitalism’s distortions of our relationship with nature limits human freedom. But without concrete political prescriptions that freedom remains rather abstract.

Review: Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (2025) by Alyssa Battistoni

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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.