This post is part of a symposium on Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Read the rest of the posts here.
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This semester, I taught a new seminar revisiting key debates about legal tools—courts, legislation, rights, and constitutionalism—within struggles for emancipation. We began with Rob Knox’s essential riposte to the default liberalism of even critical legal scholars. In Strategy and Tactics, Knox argues that scholars often obscure the distinction between strategy, “how it is that one would fight and win a war,” and tactics, “how to win the individual battles and engagements of which the war is composed.” As a result, our interventions in political debates perpetually focus on short-term, conjunctural considerations: glorifying frameworks of legalism in response to imperial wars, for example, without meaningfully considering alternatives or what might be lost or compromised by such an embrace. Strategy requires identifying the structures of possibility—say capitalism and bourgeois democracy—and the fundamental limitations imposed by those same structures. For tactical battles, we must understand those organic structures and their shape in the here and the now. Long-form assessment is necessary as we move between the abstract and the concrete: to identify the gaps and contradictions that we might target, the monsters in our rear-view mirrors, and the dead ends before our very noses.
The seminar was more theoretical than what I usually teach. To my surprise, the remove became a useful clearing from which to think about the present. It is a moment shaped by unprecedented mobilizations, rebellions, and cultural shifts—and some concrete if limited material wins—including people banding together to organize workplaces, fight the fascization taking root across the country, and launch internationalist solidarity flotillas. But it is also a moment of staggering failure and loss.
It was against this backdrop that I read Alyssa Battistoni’s gratifying new book, Free Gifts. A powerful work of theory, it is a text that simultaneously resists being reduced into programmatic form yet offers vital insights for regrouping in the daunting months and years ahead. Battistoni argues that nature’s devaluation as a “free gift” is not a glitch or coincidence. Rather, it is foundational to capitalist social relations.
To see how this argument works, we can begin from a central insight of Marxist analysis, that capital possesses an insatiable hunger: to gobble up more and more for commodification. Yet precisely because capitalism values (and forces us to value) things only insofar as they can be exchanged, it constrains our ability to treat “nonhuman nature” as anything but a free gift. No matter how hard we try, there is no clear way for us to “make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the nonhuman world, and to take responsibility for those decisions.” That goes as much for endangered species as it does for single-use plastics and oil and gas pipelines.
While standard accounts of capitalism focus on its tendency to expand, Battistoni focuses on where it abdicates and neglects. She runs a generative parallel, for example, between the capitalism’s surplus populations—people “whose labor is superfluous to capital’s needs, who need a job but cannot find one, and who have to find some other way to reproduce their lives”—and what she calls surplus species—“the species, organisms, and ecosystems whose capacities are essentially irrelevant to capital, and which are therefore left to fend for themselves.” The law of capitalist accumulation requires rendering extraneous millions of human and non-human forms of life.
Capitalism, on this view, fundamentally restricts our freedom, not only as workers and consumers but as citizens and political subjects. By imposing a singular form of value on us, it denies us the opportunity to determine, collectively, how we should value the natural world (or anything else, for that matter). It also results in class rule, which gives “a tiny fraction of people” motivated by “the competitive pressure of the market” the power to “shape the world in which the rest of us live.” As Battistoni writes:
We are thrown into a world in which we are enjoined to buy and sell the things we need to survive, told to think only of our own needs and leave coordination up to the market — then suddenly charged with responsibility for the harms we inadvertently perpetrate. However much we agonize over our consumer choices, the market is not and cannot be a site for the exercise of collective reason, dialogue, deliberation or reflection.
In the recent revival of Marxist state and legal theory, Battistoni is an indispensable voice. Here, her focus is on how capitalism mediates and reproduces nature. But the connections to the state and law as terrains and relations of struggle are clear. The state under capitalism—dependent on the market, enclosure, and commodity exchange for the reproduction of society itself—is fundamentally hostile to democracy. This is true even as it necessarily absorbs and refracts popular struggles that gesture toward the possibilities of a society organized around collective responsibility for human and non-human forms of life. Even ostensibly democratic processes like legislation and rulemaking do not operate in a transparent or responsive way: so much of what determines law and policy is not as open or democratically negotiable as LPE scholars may unwittingly assume. Scholarly research underlining the entanglement of concentrated wealth with lawmaking, and the relative impotence of popular preferences, testify to this point. But Battistoni argues compellingly that this is not a contingent problem of our time and place but one that is squarely embedded within capitalist social relations.
For just as capitalism’s impulse to commodify and financialize something—like housing—is not subject to referendum, neither is its desire to consistently devalue something—like domestic labor or the environment. Hydraulic drive for profit rules. That drive defines the state and produces a legal form that draws from and reproduces capitalist social relations that concentrate economic and political power. It limits the possibilities for laws and policies that redress climate catastrophe, that dent capital accumulation on a national and imperial scale, and that restrain the police/military power on which that accumulation relies.
To see these dynamics is to see capitalism and its legalism as limits we must duck and dodge with an eye toward an emancipatory horizon, rather than as antidotes in struggles against fascism, racism, and patriarchy. It is to see how capitalism systematically concentrates power in a way that lends itself to fascization. Facing the limits, rather than ignoring them, is necessary to the reformulation of strategy and tactics ahead. Whether it is by building capacity for non-reformist reforms or organizing a rainbow of parties, unions, and organizations of and for working-class and poor people, the task before us is to remake the very social relations from which these fundamental problems emerge.
As Battistoni models, this is not a time to abandon either radical imagination or the radical critique on which it depends. But to continue looking and acting together, unflinching and prepared for navigating the inevitable limits we will hit.
