1If capitalism is all about relentless commodification, how come it fails to value many kinds of nature, treating it, in Marx’s famous expression, as a “free gift”? This seeming paradox is the problem that political scientist Alyssa Battistoni sets out to explore in her book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Battistoni argues that the “free gift” is not an alternative to the capitalist commodity, but rather “a distinctively capitalist form ... the form that nature takes in societies in which commodity exchange is generalized” (p. 10). The book contends that understanding this distinctive form will not only help us understand the predicament of nature under capitalism but, in true Marxist fashion, also shed new light on capitalism as a whole. The structure of the book is organized around three objectives: offering a theory of the free gift (Ch. 1), developing a critique of “capitalist unfreedom” (Ch. 2 and 7), and exploring how the abstract form of the free gift works in the real world (Ch. 3-6).

2Chapter 1 constitutes the theoretical kernel of the book, offering an extended discussion of the free gift. Battistoni argues that most critics of capitalism have tended to understand capital’s destruction of nature as the result of “extraeconomic” processes, whether violence (e.g., enclosure) or ideology (e.g., the separation of nature and culture). Instead, she calls for an “immanent” approach that focuses on economic (i.e., market) mechanisms: capitalism does not actively or intentionally devalue nature; rather, nature’s lack of value is the shadow of the value relations that structure a society characterized by generalized commodity exchange and market dependence. Battistoni’s immanent approach thus locates the problem in the very ordinary functioning of capitalism, a compelling argument, although one that is sometimes sustained by establishing too stark a separation between the political and the economic.

3Chapter 2 is devoted to the “critique of capitalist unfreedom”, and, with Chapter 7, provides the normative core of the book. By imposing its law of value, capitalism limits people’s ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free gift. Battistoni claims that capitalism is a form of rule composed of “class rule” and “market rule.” “Market freedom,” the author argues, is, in fact, “market rule”, as it compels us “to treat human nature as a free gift – regardless of our individual ethical assessments or moral values” (79). Capitalism’s singular form of value not only releases us from responsibility for the consequences of our actions but, crucially, it also restricts the fundamental human project of collectively determining values (in plural) for ourselves. To restore freedom, Battistoni looks to the existentialist tradition of Sartre and de Beauvoir, for whom values are only what we assert and actively commit ourselves to in the world.

4While the free gift is a fundamental (abstract) form of capitalism, valorization can never be frictionless as it must pass through the material world. Thus, Battistoni exhorts us to “rematerialize capitalism,” and she does so by following the free gift into the domains of commodity production (Ch. 3), the byproduction of waste (Ch. 4), reproductive labor (Ch. 5) and the regeneration of the biosphere (Ch. 6). In these chapters, which remain theoretically focused, the number of authors (from a wide range of disciplines) and topics explored is impressive. The sheer volume of arguments Battistoni presents, however, sometimes obscures her main points, a circumstance compounded by her tendency to overemphasize the novelty of her ideas. Take Chapter 3, for instance. There, Battistoni argues that material qualities affect capital’s ability to organize production, adding that “the significance of this fact has been radically underappreciated” (92). This point, however, has been made time and again by geographers working on resources and is fundamental to peasant studies. Later, we read that “a crucial political consequence of this account is often overlooked: technology is not only molded by social relations, but mediates social relations” (94). Yet it is unlikely that anyone who has read Marx’s chapters on machines and manufacture would overlook this. The chapter concludes with a political intervention in line with the author’s (and our own) Marxist sympathies. Battistoni cautions against identifying domains of production (often nature-based) that are not really subsumed (think of Anna Tsing’s matsutake) as non-capitalist spaces of freedom or resistance, claiming that these spaces orbit around capital and are therefore part of capitalism. Thus, we should rid ourselves of any temptations of resisting capitalism from the outside, and rather organize the working classes, broadly understood, to challenge it from within.

5Chapter 5 offers readers an illuminating discussion of the dilemma faced by Marxist feminists when squaring the circle of an anti-essentialist position on gender, on the one hand, and the devaluation of reproductive labor, on the other. Battistoni argues that key interventions in this tradition (e.g., the Wages for Housework movement, Maria Mies on housewifization) resolve this tension by adopting what she calls a “naturalization thesis,” which attributes the devaluation of reproductive labor to the ideological construction of this work as women’s natural remit. To counter this tendency, and echoing arguments made elsewhere in the book (e.g., her discussion of waste in Ch. 4), Battistoni argues that reproductive labor – broadly defined – is devalued because of its material condition, which, like other free gifts, thwarts the real subsumption of life’s work to capital (149). Battistoni thus contributes to a common theoretical apparatus that connects value relations of un- and underpaid labor, on the one hand, and nature’s “free gifts” on the other, an important contribution of the book. Battistoni, unfortunately, turns away from this literature in the second part of the chapter, and instead moves towards a marginalist explanation found in William Baumol’s theory of labor-intensive service work. Adopting Baumol’s theory that reproductive labor is un(der)paid and underprovided because it cannot be made profitable, and thus suffers disinvestment, is hardly satisfying, and misses an opportunity for deeper dialogue with the scholars that Battistoni so lucidly critiques.

6This is an ambitious book that covers a wide range of topics and authors. Coupled with its accessible prose and the importance and timeliness of the subject matter, the book is bound to be amply discussed and to make a significant impact among those on the left struggling to make sense of our current ecological crisis. Although at times the book suffers from excessive dispersion, it remains held together by the concept of “free gifts”, which serves as an apt focal point. It may seem unfair to suggest that Battistoni did not engage with the literature on “the gift” given the book’s extensive (perhaps overextensive) bibliography. Nonetheless, her bibliography on the topic is mostly confined to classical, foundational references (mostly, Mauss, Polanyi, and Bataille). Anthropologists are likely to feel that engagement with key authors in exchange theory (Nancy Munn, Annette Weiner, and Maurice Godelier come immediately to mind) and perhaps also with Marxist anthropological literature on value could have informed a more robust treatment of the gift in the text.

7If treatment of the gift is rather thin, Free gifts engages at length with its counterpart: freedom. Battistoni returns to this topic in two powerful chapters (Chapter 7 and the Epilogue), in which she brings together the book’s political lessons. Echoing Pierre Charbonnier’s Affluence and freedom, Battistoni argues that the Western, dominant version of freedom is fundamentally material, as it is anchored to fossil fuels and the domination of nature, and asserts the need to develop a new version of freedom, not as a “solution to ecological dilemmas”, but as a key to “face those problems more directly” (210). After discarding a series of approaches– such as republicanism, for having a purely social understanding of freedom; or those that call for the need to stay within natural limits, for having a romantic ring – Battistoni returns to de Beauvoir and calls for an “ambiguous freedom” that can straddle a middle way between materialist pessimism and social optimism, a notion of freedom that takes “the Earth … as both the condition of and constraint upon our freedom” (226). Battistoni’s insistence that there are no magical solutions, her mistrust towards any call for an “ethical reawakening” (236), and her anti-essentialism (“we must let go … of the fantasy that we can step outside of human perspectives. If this is anthropocentric, I think it is also honest”, 235) are all welcome and salutary.

8Against any view that may claim the possibility for a final resolution to ecological problems, Battistoni tells us that we must be able to “stay with the trouble of ambiguity” (229) and calls for a process of democratic decision-making against the unfreedom of the market: “the choices before us may be stark … but they are choices for which we must take responsibility” (230; emphasis our own; who is the “we”?). Whatever we call this notion of freedom – existentialist, radically humanist, democratic socialist – it is hard not to agree with it. Yet although Battistoni argues that this “ambiguous freedom” is “not so much an objective as a method” (229), it remains unclear how, and where, it can in itself generate the kind of democratic decision-making she envisions without some form of coordinated political action and institutional change—questions that the book leaves largely unexplored. Nonetheless, by claiming freedom for an ecological, anti-capitalist politics for the left, Free Gifts offers readers a key tool towards building coordinated action in the future.