Free Gifts
Capitalism and the Politics of Nature
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
A timely new critique of capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature
Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing 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. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.
Battistoni 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The problem at the root of capitalism's relationship with nature isn't exploitation per se, but that nature is treated as "free," writes political scientist Battistoni (A Planet to Win) in this stimulating treatise. The author traces the capitalist view of nature as a "free gift"—as opposed to a commodity that can be exchanged—from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, focusing on Adam Smith's and Karl Marx's ideas about what distinguishes human labor from natural resources. Elsewhere, Battistoni links this theoretical framework not just to resource extraction but the "externalization" of damage done to nature (with pollution considered "surplus matter" of the production process) and even why the "natural" work of reproductive labor goes uncompensated. Battistoni is a rigorous and skilled polemicist; she showcases her original close readings of classic texts without veering too far into the weeds. Her investigation adds up to a fascinating look at how a "free" nature functions, ironically, to restrict human freedom to make ethical and socially responsible decisions: "By compelling us to treat nature as a free gift, capitalism limits our ability to act on our judgements about... how we ought to value other kinds of beings, and how we might live differently as a result." It adds up to an insightful theoretical approach to the climate crisis.
