by Jochen Schmon

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. Battistoni is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso, 2019) and the author of the recently published Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2025), which puts forward a value-theoretical rather than moral analysis of capitalism’s appropriation of nature. She discussed her new book with Jochen Schmon.

Jochen Schmon: Whereas so-called “new materialists” like Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, or Anna Tsing conceptualize planetary life’s destruction as “anthropocentric,” Marxists designate this contemporary condition as the “Capitalocene”; it is capital itself, not the “species” of human beings, that has become the dominant geological agent. You participate in this critique of “naïve materialism,” but you also problematize the “moral naturalism” of current Marxist materialisms as the second “frequent tendency in ecological thought” (15). What are these two fallacies in the critical theorization of the, in your words, “politics of nature”?

Alyssa Battistoni: One of the book’s theoretical interventions is to think more dialectically about materiality as understood by both historical materialists and the so-called new materialists. Materialism in a Marxist sense has typically meant focusing on what commentators sometimes gloss as “economic” factors, but which we might more accurately describe as capitalism’s social relations. This has often meant following the ways that capitalism abstracts away from the material, qualitative realm of use values and concrete labor. The new materialism is in part a response to that tendency: new materialists tend to charge Marxism and other theoretical traditions with detachment from the actual physical stuff of the world and call on scholars to attend to the agential qualities of nonhumans.

This strikes me as reminiscent of people like the physiocrats and early classical political economists, who saw natural agents as intrinsically generative. Jean-Baptiste Say, for instance, uses the language of “natural agents” that we would now associate with someone like Latour, and he means more or less the same thing—not that they are intentional or agential in the manner of human beings, but that they have substantive effects in the material world. And, of course, they do! But this is a naïve materialism, like the physiocratic view that locates surplus value in wheat itself rather than in the social relations which produce it, declaring nature generative of all wealth. A familiar Marxist critique instead situates these nonhuman agencies within capitalism, yet we need to do more to integrate attention to the specific material qualities of different commodities, resources, labor processes, and so on into Marxist analyses. The Marxist tradition that has most substantially attempted that is eco-Marxism. Andreas Malm’s study of fossil capital, for instance, really productively reads the material qualities of different kinds of fuels through capitalist social relations.

My critique of eco-Marxism, however, is that an implicit moral naturalism often underpins it. In other words, eco-Marxism often contains an unacknowledged normative thrust, seeing nature in itself as a moral good against which we can evaluate capitalism. Take, for instance, John Bellamy Foster’s influential critique of “the metabolic rift”: Foster argues that capitalism has caused a disruption in the metabolic cycles of nature, and it undoubtedly has, but he implies that this disruption is a bad thing, worthy of critique in and of itself. If we understand human-natural relationships as perpetually developing and changing, however, it’s harder to make that charge stick: what makes some ecological changes bad? More generally, I want to caution against moral appeals to nature as a basis for critique, since they are almost never liberatory. My book instead develops a critique of capitalism that isn’t rooted in the sheer fact that it disrupts or destroys nature, but that instead focuses on how and why it does so, and what that tells us about how it organizes human political and social life. 

JS: You show how liberal political economy’s conceptions of nature crystallize capitalism’s material devaluation of non-human life as a “free gift”—one that economic production can appropriate and use without payment. But here you also seem to charge current Marxist scholarship with failing to transcend this destructive conception of nature. Can you tell us how you deploy value-form analyses to develop a critique of political ecology that could overcome these liberal residues in the ecological conceptualizations of contemporary Marxist theory?

AB: The idea of nature as a gift originates in older traditions of political economy and indeed is prevalent in political thought more broadly. We see it across Western political thought, from Locke to Rousseau, and in non-Western thinkers working in Indigenous traditions, like Robin Wall Kimmerer. But I focus on how the idea appears in the work of the classical political economists whom Marx targets in his critique of political economy: people like Jean-Baptiste Say and David Ricardo who describe the gratuitous contributions of natural agents—from sheep’s organs to wind-powered sails—to production. As I’ve suggested above, I see these as examples of a naïve materialism: they tend to take these natural agents at face value, seeing in them a kind of natural power to generate wealth.

In the third volume of Capital, Marx offers a critique of that position, insisting that, within a capitalist society, only capital benefits from the “free gift[s] of nature.” Eco-Marxist and eco-socialist traditions have often referenced this critique but haven’t developed it more fully, and most other Marxists have had very little to say about nature. So the free gift is an undertheorized but potent concept. It offers a way to understand nature not only as a “topic” that interested Marx or as a set of ecological problems, like the depletion of soil fertility, but rather as a foundational element of capitalism’s social relations and processes of valuation. In other words, Marxists haven’t adopted the capitalist view of nature so much as avoided interrogating it fully.

I draw on the tradition of value-form or social-form analysis to theorize the free gift in relation to the commodity—capitalism’s elementary form—and to show how this theorization can help us better understand not only ecological issues but capitalism itself. In subsequent chapters, I show how the free gift of nature appears in various other forms in mainstream economics. There, I try to adopt something like Marx’s own methodology, demonstrating the inability of mainstream economic concepts and terms to fully illuminate the phenomena they describe.

JS: In your book’s analysis of the politics of production, you claim that critical theories of capitalism have focused too narrowly on the regulation of labor processes and production technologies by social relations of power. You draw our attention to the importance of capital’s domination of the ecological conditions of production, which in turn condition the well-being of workers’ bodies. “Class power,” as you write, “is the power to produce the environment itself” (133).This leads you to radically reconceptualize pollution, which economists usually conceive as “environmental side-effects” or the economy’s “external byproducts,” as instead the “ability to impose pollution on others as another aspect of class power—and the inability to refuse it a form of unfreedom in its own right” (120). Can you explain how your book intervenes in the critical theorization of production and the stakes for our thinking about ecological justice?

AB: The book makes a couple of interventions with respect to the problems that are typically framed as “pollution.” One is to offer a critique of mainstream economic theories of the “externality” framework for understanding environmental harm as articulated by twentieth-century economists like Arthur Pigou and Ronald Coase, showing how these phenomena have to be understood within capitalism as a distinctive system. The second is to shift the sphere of critical analysis. The extant literature on environmental justice has focused on identifying and critiquing the unequal distribution of environmental harms. Though this has been an important project, it amounts to what Moishe Postone calls a “critique of distribution” rather than a critique of production. In many ways, it is analogous to the thrust of the distributive justice literature within political theory, even if quite different in method and style.

The book instead turns to the hidden abode of production, where those harms are generated as part of the process of producing commodities. Doing so helps us understand pollution not only as something that populations bear unevenly, but as something that distinct groups of people—those who own the means of production and control investment—produce throughactions driven by impersonal social forces. These phenomena are described in the economic literature as “externalities” or “social costs” and tend to be discussed in a technical vein. But when we descend into the hidden abode, we see how they are structured by class power: in this case the power to decide which byproducts are produced as part of the process of producing commodities, and to impose those physical byproducts, whether toxic waste or smoke or carbon emissions, onto others who have little choice but to accept and indeed absorb them. In other words, this vantage point allows us to not only track the effects of pollution, but to diagnose its causes.

This perspectival shift also has a political upshot: it shows how the same class relation appears differently inside and outside of the formal workplace. The environment is sometimes seen, in the paradigmatic term of Nancy Fraser, as “beyond” the hidden abode of production. But it also is the point of production, insofar as it is directly altered and remade during commodity production. So this perspective helps us connect the kinds of struggles typically described in terms of environmental justice to the kinds of workplace and labor struggles that are more familiar within the Marxist tradition. At the same time, I try to clarify the distinctions between these positions: namely, the difference between entering into a formal contract with the capitalist to sell one’s labor power—effectively, one’s bodily capacities—and having those same bodily capacities subjected to the byproducts of production without any such agreement. This, finally, is part of the book’s broader argument: that we have to be as attentive to the spaces, processes, and materials that capital abdicates, neglects, and expels as we are to those it absorbs and consumes.

JS: One of your most persistent and penetrating claims is that critical theory’s foundational strategy of “denaturalizing” social relations often “dematerializes” them (13). You depict this tendency as surprisingly prevalent in the theorization of reproductive labor, a mode of analysis which has otherwise been extremely generative for ecological critique. As you argue, even Marxist eco-feminists have insufficiently studied the reasons for the systematic devaluation of both reproductive labor and the planetary biosphere, which they identify as the former’s natural correlate. How do you explain the failure of capitalism and its critics alike to value both human and planetary reproduction?

AB: The tension between denaturalizing and dematerializing is one of the book’s central problematics. Critical social theorists of various stripes, from Marxists to feminists, often begin by arguing that phenomena treated as natural are actually social, since only phenomena that are social—made by human beings in some sense—can be changed and made otherwise. This is an extremely important move, and the feminist skepticism of nature in particular is central to my critique of the overly normative view of nature embraced by many ecological thinkers. Yet this denaturalizing move can also lead thinkers to neglect the material world, which gets lumped into the category of “nature” to be dissected. This is a grave mistake: if we are to rigorously study nature, or indeed capitalism, we must attend to the physicality of the world as distinct from ideas or ideologies of nature, even as we also attend to the ways that social relations necessarily mediate that materiality.

One of the places where I explore this tension most directly is indeed in the chapter on reproductive labor and Marxist feminism. A number of Marxist feminists and ecofeminists, from Maria Mies to Nancy Fraser, have drawn attention to the parallels between capitalism’s failure to value nonhuman nature and human reproductive labor. In fact, Free Gifts originates in my effort to think through the parallels between the status of the free gift of nature and unwaged housework done by human beings. As I worked through these questions, though, I became dissatisfied with many of the existing explanations for why (so-called) reproductive labor and the “work of nature” tend to occupy these similar positions. Most feminist and ecofeminist accounts have focused on the ways that women and women’s work are “naturalized”: how they are seen and perceived as natural, and thus are treated as not work. These analyses essentially perform a kind of ideology critique, but they sometimes end up arguing in a quite idealist vein that loses track of the material kinds of labor in question.

I argue that instead of focusing on the “woman question” through which reproductive labor has been interrogated, we should pay more attention to the concrete labor processes involved in different kinds of labor and, in particular, to the significance of human embodiment within them. As I argue, the labor of reproducing human life tends to unfold on the temporalities of the body rather than those of capital. As a result, it tends to resist forms of mechanization and industrialization which are crucial for value accumulation. These sectors remain labor-intensive and minimally profitable, and they consequently attract little, if any, capital investment. In addition to clarifying the relationship between labor processes and capital accumulation, I hope that this approach offers a way to theorize the significance of human bodies and bodily difference in labor processes without presuming that certain kinds of bodies or labor are inherently gendered. In other words, I hope that it can help Marxist feminism in the vitally important project of attending to embodiment without adopting a gender essentialism.

JS:  Your critique of the devaluation of nature rejects the common political discourses of “ecological injustice” or “environmental harm” and instead argues for their conceptualization as another form of “capitalist unfreedom” (55–58, 209). In making this pivot, you also reject the neo-republican theory of “non-domination” and the more Hegelian-inspired Marxist approach of “social freedom,” which are the most prevalent ways of theorizing emancipation today. Why and how do you theorize freedom via the existentialist Marxism of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre?

AB: There are many critiques of how capitalism treats the natural world, but I find most of them unsatisfying. As I’ve suggested, they tend to charge that capitalism destroys or degrades nature. If we take a more critical perspective on nature that recognizes its perpetual flux and transformation, this critique is hard to sustain. Theories of environmental injustice, meanwhile, extend that critique of harms to their impact on human communities. Both of these analyses offer important elements of a critique, but neither presents a viable standard against which to judge capitalism. Generally, critical theories of capitalism are stronger when they focus on capitalism’s core dynamics rather than identifying a set of effects it produces—in other words, when they trace those effects to something about how capitalism fundamentally works. So my critique of capitalism—here, I take inspiration from the French existentialists—concerns how it structures relationships among human beings in a way that limits our ability to make free, conscious choices about how to organize our lives, including our relationships to the more-than-human world.

In that sense, the book joins a broader revival of Marxist and socialist accounts of freedom in recent years, which have sought to reclaim freedom from its Cold War association with capitalism and the right. A major trend in these revivals has been the recovery of a republican Marx and socialist tradition, which emphasizes freedom from arbitrary and interpersonal domination. The republican turn, however, also marks a departure from older ideas of socialist freedom, which tended to be framed in more material terms: as freedom from necessity, typically entailing a liberation from drudgery and scarcity that capitalism’s development of the productive forces theoretically enables but class society practically limits. Those accounts of freedom have tended to imagine that socialism will produce superabundance, and so they seem to regard the prospect of limits to the free use of nature’s gifts as a threat. Indeed, in recent years we have seen thinkers like Dipesh Chakrabarty raise concerns about the future of freedom in a climate-constrained world. 

I draw on existentialism to navigate a way between these two poles, which I describe as “material” and “social” accounts of freedom, while also developing a more robust critique of the phenomenon often described as “domination by the market,” which is difficult to characterize in classical republican terms. I find Simone de Beauvoir’s account of ambiguous freedom particularly rich in this endeavor. Ambiguity, for Beauvoir, describes the condition of being an embodied consciousness and captures the duality of the social and the material that threads throughout the book. While existentialism is often caricatured as hyper-individualist, Beauvoir attempts to theorize freedom as a collective and interactive project. It is not counterposed to the Hegelian notion of social freedom per se, though it is a little messier: whereas accounts of social freedom tend to describe how people’s individual freedoms and desires are reconciled with the social totality, Beauvoir emphasizes that collective freedom is a fragile and ongoing project. That’s why I consider it a really important resource for a world undergoing unprecedented transformation.

JS: This existentialist approach to emancipation also seems to be crucial for the development of one of your central criticisms of ‘new materialist’ theories and ‘Anthropocene discourse’ alike. With the help of Beauvoir and Sartre, you claim that there is no escape from an essentially human valuation of nature, that the “value of nature must be what we make of it.” In bold terms you declare at the end of your book that “if this is anthropocentric, I think it is also honest” (235). Please tell us what exactly you mean by what sounds like a rather unpopular, unreserved Anthropocentrism.

AB: I want to first note that the book draws a distinction between the way that capitalism values nature and how we might otherwise. It argues that capitalism is a humanism: capitalism institutes a foundational divide between human beings and all other entities, in which the vast array of nonhumans are constituted in the form of the free gift. That is an analytical argument rather than a normative one: I’m not endorsing this division, but showing how it arises from capitalist social relations and the wage relation in particular. I recognize that human beings have distinctive qualities without endorsing a hierarchy of being.

But I also argue for valuing nature differently than capitalism does, and that this is a distinctively human responsibility. A lot of ecological ethics makes the claim that nature has “intrinsic value,” but while I’m sympathetic to the desire to assert the value of nonhuman entities, I don’t find this claim very useful. The notion of intrinsic value often seems to rest on an unstated appeal to the divine or some power beyond human life: nature acts as a stand-in for God. More practically, it’s never clear to me what appeals to intrinsic value actually mean for how we should act in the world. We can say that nature has intrinsic value, but in our lives we will inevitably have to interact with other beings, relate to them, and use them—sometimes even in ways that will destroy them. We have to recognize that we’re making those decisions all the time and take responsibility for them.

Existentialism gives us resources for counteracting that pervasive moral view of nature. Sartre and de Beauvoir insist that values are not given by God or nature, but rather are only what we choose to assert and enact in the world. The existentialist view of value is anthropocentric insofar as it holds that value is a human category, and that human beings are responsible for deciding what is valuable—but it is not the sort of anthropocentrism that says that only humans have value. We absolutely can value other kinds of beings and other forms of life, but we have to choose to do so, in action as well as words. That may not be popular, but I think it’s true.

JS: The vast environmental harm wrought by the actually existing socialist regimes of the twentieth century seems to have motivated many scholars of ecology to depart from Marxist theory. Instead of analyzing the various social relations that organize the technologies of production, critics of the “Anthropocene” prioritize technology itself, assigning responsibility for today’s existential ecological disaster to the “industrial age.” Bucking this trend, both your latest book and your previous, co-authored book A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso, 2019) aim to reinvent a socialist politics for our time. How do you defend the necessity of Marxist theory and socialist politics against its ecological critics?

AB: It’s true that actually existing socialist regimes have largely had poor environmental records, and of course certain technologies do tend to produce certain environmental effects regardless of the social order in which they exist. Any society that burns fossil fuels, for instance, will generate carbon emissions.

But the response of many scholars, as you suggest, has often been to adopt an account in which technology or “industrial society” alone is at the root of ecological crisis. In my view, those accounts tend to have an overly simplistic view of technology itself as a neutral, wholly technical enterprise, rather than recognizing the different ways that technology is shaped by and used within particular societies. I think that socialist societies are certainly capable of using resources and technologies in ecologically destructive ways, but such uses are not compelled in the same way as in capitalist societies. So I try to give an account of how and why capitalism constrains our ability to relate to the more-than-human world, but I don’t thereby argue that a socialist society necessarily would act differently—only that it could.

It’s also true that many Marxists have been relatively inattentive to ecology, though Marx himself has been overly maligned in this regard and criticized for Prometheanism, anthropocentrism, productivism, and so on, as scholars like John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito have shown. My work tries neither to rescue Marx from his ecological critics nor to recover moments of his own ecological thought, but rather to insist that his core analysis of capitalism is invaluable for understanding the planet-making system of our time. Capitalism is effectively the only system operating today, and so we have to understand its own particular dynamics, irrespective of the record of other kinds of social orders.

In my political work, I have tried to develop a more concrete eco-socialist platform. My commitment to eco-socialism is principled but also pragmatic. I think that a transition away from fossil fuels should be undertaken in just and egalitarian ways, but I also think that decarbonizing our existing world and building an ecologically sustainable society will require forms of action—planning, public goods provision, capital discipline—that I do not think capitalism is capable of undertaking. A successful climate politics has to be a mass climate politics, one that addresses the problems of daily life—work, housing, transit—in ways that show that it’s possible for everyone to live a good life on our shared planet.

JS: Your scholarship seems to have been inspired by your own political work as an organizer, publicist, and writer. Are your future research interests also motivated by a commitment to engage in current political issues and struggles?

AB: My interest in climate change developed in response to Hurricane Katrina, and since then my scholarship has always developed in conversation with my political work and public writing. Sometimes that has taken the form of more direct political interventions, like A Planet to Win or writing for outlets like Jacobin, Dissent, and New Left Review. By contrast, Free Gifts is more theoretical, but it also tethers the more abstract analysis of capitalism to its concrete instantiations in mainstream elements of climate policy, like carbon taxes and natural capital.

I’m currently beginning a new book project on climate, capitalism, and the state that engages more directly with contemporary politics, drawing on Marxist state theory to better understand how and why states have acted to address climate change—or, more often, why they haven’t—while also seeking to update state theory for the age of climate change. Eco-Marxist thought has been very dynamic in recent years, but most major works in this tradition strangely neglect the state, which we will have to understand better to act strategically. So I hope that this project can provide some clarity at the level of theory, while also speaking to the shifts we’re seeing in climate politics away from the market-fundamentalist approaches of the 1980s–2010s and towards a more state-interventionist model of climate policy, whether the green industrial policy of the PRC or the “marketcraft” of the US. I also hope that it will be a useful analytic tool for climate movements seeking to engage with states, whether through direct action campaigns seeking to block fossil fuel infrastructure or mass movements in support of decarbonization.

Jochen Schmon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research. He studies the conceptual history of slavery and the discursive resonances of abolitionist politics in the emerging feminist, republican, anarchist, and communist imaginaries of the 19th century.

Edited by Zac Endter.

Featured image: Frans Snyders, A draped table laden with game, fruit, vegetables and a boar’s head, ca. 1609–1657, via Wikimedia Commons.