Why, under capitalism, are the bombs used to level Gaza imbued with value, but the ocean’s capacity to sequester carbon is not? Why do solar panels or lumps of coal have value but the work of raising a child remains, strictly speaking, valueless? No one could argue that the ocean’s contribution to maintaining a habitable planet or the work of raising the next generation is worthless in a moral or economic sense, and yet under capitalism they are free and are likely to remain so. Efforts to put a price on the carbon-sequestering abilities of earth systems have stumbled repeatedly, but the price of a precision-guided Mark 84 bomb stands at $30,000–$40,000 per unit. According to Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, the reason for this discrepancy does not lie in our moral failures or with a lack of policy and regulation, but in the capitalist form of value itself, which must render certain natural processes and human activities as valueless—as free gifts—if it is to generate value at all.
Karl Marx had hinted at this phenomenon in his occasional use of the notion “free gift.” This apparent pleonasm denies Marcel Mauss’s observation that the act of gifting forms an obligation between the gift giver and receiver. What makes the free gift free is the negation of all relations of debt or reciprocation. According to Battistoni, this distinctly capitalist form of gift “remains remarkably undertheorized next to the likes of the commodity” (p. 32) and yet it can reveal something essential about capital’s inner workings.
Free Gifts is an ambitious work incorporating discussions of the physiocratic view of nature, Hayekian notions of freedom, existentialist philosophy, social reproduction theory, Marxist value-form theory, and more besides. As Battistoni explains in the book’s introduction, this literature is marshalled to support three overarching arguments: first, a theorization of the free gift itself; second, an existentialist theory of how capitalism produces unfreedom; and third, a “rematerialization” of form-analytic Marxist political theory.
Battistoni distinguishes her theory of the free gift from two popular critical perspectives on capital’s exploitation of nature. The first, which she calls the “worldview approach,” emphasizes discursive and ideological procedures that construct nature, including human beings and forms of social activity deemed natural or close to nature, as an inexhaustible pool of freely available resources. The second, which she calls the “expropriation approach,” emphasizes capitalism’s violent seizure of nonhuman nature and noncapitalistically organized social activity in pursuit of value. For Battistoni, these theories provide a truncated critique of capital since they locate capital’s ecologically destructive tendencies in the extra-economic processes of ideology or violence and, in so doing, miss how “nature figures in capitalism’s own social relations” (p. 24, emphasis in the original). By contrast, Battistoni positions the free gift as a “capitalist social form” (p. 25, emphasis in the original) inherent to all capitalist social relations, including industrial manufacturing and agriculture (chapter 4), reproductive labor (chapter 5), and “nature-based” (p. 85) sectors such as “natural capital” markets (chapter 6). The free gift is rendered the shadow of capitalist value, its ever-present accompaniment.
From this foundation, Battistoni develops an existentialist theory of how capitalism produces unfreedom. We need such a theory, Battistoni wagers, because most ecological critiques of capitalism are based on uninterrogated moral judgments about “nature”: capitalism “degrades,” “destroys,” “exploits,” or “dominates” nonhuman nature. Such phrases imply a prior “natural” baseline or ideal from which capital has caused “nature” to depart, raising the question of how such a baseline is determined and the fraught issue of how “nature” is distinguished from “society.”
According to Battistoni, a more persuasive critique begins from the observation that capital strips us of the freedom to treat nonhuman nature as anything other than a “free gift.” Following Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Battistoni says that freedom “consists in the possibility of choosing to be other than what we are and taking responsibility for what we decide” (p. 55). Under capitalism, however, our freedom is constrained by what Battistoni calls “class rule” and “market rule.” Class rule “is a form of the rule of the few over the many, channelled through private ownership of the means of production and private power over investment” (p. 56). This produces unfreedom because the decisions of a minority of humanity, who are themselves subject to “market rule,” shape human and nonhuman futures. Market rule, meanwhile, compels capitalists and workers alike to mediate their choices through the market, which is governed by the capitalist law of value, and thus strips workers and capitalists alike of the “freedom to choose” different forms of valuing (p. 55). Combined, these forms of rule ensure that under capitalism we are unable to treat nature as anything other than valueless and we are unfree to choose a future for humans and non-human nature that is not governed by capital’s homogenizing law of value.
Freedom might consist in the power to choose, but we do not make our choices in a vacuum. The materiality of the nonhuman world itself structures our choices. Battistoni’s third line of argument draws on this insight, which she finds in de Beauvoir’s existentialism, to “rematerialize” Marxist value-form theory. Although Free Gifts is grounded in form-analytic accounts of capitalism—which study capital in what Marx called its “ideal average” (Capital Vol. III, 1991) by abstracting away what is said to be contextually specific or arbitrary to interrogate capital’s essential formal features—Battistoni maintains that this literature has often overemphasized social forms at the expense of theorizing the dialectical relation of form and content. To remedy this, Battistoni deftly reintroduces the materialities and temporalities of nonhuman nature and human labor, which shape concrete realizations of exchange value (pp. 33–35), and our freedom to choose (chapter 7).
There are, nevertheless, some shortcomings with Battistoni’s form-analytic theory of the free gift. As useful as Marx’s methodological procedure of abstraction can be, value-form theoretical approaches to contemporary capitalism set aside a host of phenomena that, far from being contextually contingent, were pivotal to capitalism’s historical development and still uphold its value-form today. In Free Gifts, the state is a significant example. Largely absent from Battistoni’s theorization of capital, the state appears principally in her theorization of natural capital markets, where it is presented as an abstract form that intervenes to resolve the ecological and social challenges capital deems unprofitable (pp. 198–201). This, however, underspecifies the state’s varied roles in reproducing the conditions for capital accumulation and abstracts from the international state system’s contributions to the realization of value.
The value of a Mark 84 bomb, for instance, is derived from the fact that it congeals within it a certain amount of abstract labor power while treating nature as a free gift, but its use by the United States and Israeli armies reproduces a global imperialist division of labor, global relations of ecologically unequal exchange, and ultimately the capital relation itself. Battistoni’s “rematerialization” of value theory should open the door to such an analysis. Yet by abstracting away the international system and by theorizing the state’s capacity to enact violence as extra-economic rather than as dialectically entwined with markets, Free Gifts erroneously separates the so-called “expropriation approach” from the free gift and capitalist value from its material basis within an international state system.
Battistoni’s form-analytic approach also shapes Free Gifts’ theorization of class. For Marx, capital as a social relation is inextricable from, and continually reproduced by, class struggle. While Battistoni refers to social movements and workers’ struggles to illustrate her arguments, class struggle in this sense remains external to Free Gifts’ theorization of capital. Instead, the notion of “class rule” one-sidedly names how an abstract “capitalist class” uses its “class power,” without situating this activity within the wider totality of capitalist class struggles (p. 58). Tellingly, the notion of “class power” denotes for Battistoni the actions of the capitalist class, with no such equivalent extended to the power of the working classes as both reproducers of capital and adversaries to it.
Despite these limitations, Free Gifts is an important contribution to political theories of capitalism and nature. Battistoni’s insistence on grounding social and ecological critique within capital’s laws of value rather than extraneous moral judgement, though not wholly original, is well-argued and will be of interest across the political sciences. Her interweaving of existentialist philosophy, feminist theory, and eco-Marxism, meanwhile, is highly original and deserves serious engagement by those working at the juncture of green and critical social theory.
