Book Talk with Alyssa Battistoni 'Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature'

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Alyssa Battistoni  is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in modern social and political thought. Her forthcoming book is Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton, 2025).

"Free Gifts presents a new theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature, one which can help us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, and which casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in new light. The book recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature deployed by classical economic thinkers to describe the gratuitous contributions of “natural agents,” and builds on Marx’s critique to show that capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking.

It shows how the problem of the free gift recurs in twentieth century political economy across four central chapters addressing different instances, each associated with a distinct site: the free gift as the machine in the factory; pollution of the environment; reproductive labor in the household; and natural capital in the biosphere.

Along the way, it also offers an unconventional history of twentieth-century political thought, offering new readings of major thinkers and concepts, including Friedrich Hayek, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Finally, Free Gifts offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, drawing on materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the nonhuman world, and proposing an account of our freedom as situated, embodied, and ambiguous."

Location: The Centre for Anthropocene History, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology , Level 5, Teknikringen 74D