Red Emma’s

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.

"A truly wonderful book. . . . It’s a very thorough reconstruction of how capitalism operates, generally and in relation to nature. . . . It’s enormously erudite, incredibly wide-ranging in its readings. It’s written in a lively prose. . . . . It’s developing, in my view, a very original synthesis of value form analysis and existential philosophy that I haven’t seen before. . . . [and] it also is very conceptually creative and comes up with concepts that I find very useful. . . . This is the most important work in ecological Marxism in a very long time." —Andreas Malm, Historical Materialism