Lecture by Alyssa Battistoni (Barnard College)

Date 2 July 2026, 4:15 pm
Location SH 1.109

Cooperation of the RTG Fixing Futures and the colloquium of the research group „Biotechnologies, Nature and Society“ at Goethe University.

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. Free Gifts 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, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, the book 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. 

The book 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. This endeavour is achieved through new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, the book 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.

Bio
Alyssa Battistoni is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. She is a political theorist with research interests in environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and the history of political thought. She is the co-author, with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), and Free Gifts. Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Zone Books 2025).