Red Emma’s

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.

Alyssa Battistoni is a political theorist and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. She works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in contemporary social and political thought. Her academic work has been published in Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, and Contemporary Political Theory, and she writes frequently for publications including The Nation, Dissent, the New Left Review, n+1, Boston Review, and Jacobin. She is a member of the Climate and Community Project and serves on the editorial board of Dissent. Alyssa is the co-author of A PLANET TO WIN: WHY WE NEED A GREEN NEW DEAL (Verso 2019), with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos.

Patrick Bigger directs CCI’s Research Department as well as leading research on CCI’s Global Systems and Policy work, including writing on Green Industrial Policy, the role of the Pentagon in the climate crisis, and the international political economy of biodiversity loss. Prior to joining CCI, Patrick was a Lecturer in Economic Geography at Lancaster University in the UK and holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Kentucky. He has written extensively in academic journals including Science and Nature: Ecology and Evolution, and in popular outlets including Dissent and The Nation. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and covered in press globally.