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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In the first half of 2025, China installed more solar photovoltaic capacity than every other country in the world put together. By August, however, the pace of Chinese photovoltaic installation dropped to an almost three-year low amid a glut in supply and a shifting subsidy structure. While it is cheap to generate energy using solar PVs (which is why they are central to most energy transition proposals), it is difficult to develop the necessary infrastructure without relying on public subsidies and risking overproduction and falling prices—at which point, unprofitability disincentivizes further installation. This contradiction is “a microcosm of the general predicament” facing contemporary planning for meaningful decarbonization.
In her new book, Alyssa Battistoni provides a framework for making sense of such challenges. Free Gifts is an incisive critique of both mainstream and heterodox approaches to the political economy of climate change, as well as a state-of-the-art conspectus of contemporary critical theory. Battistoni shows that the fundamental barrier to any meaningful response to catastrophic climate change is the accumulation of capital. The specifically capitalist form of our society is the cause of environmental catastrophe and climate breakdown.
Battistoni declares at the outset of Free Gifts that her argument is scaffolded upon “a value form analysis of capitalist logics.” Value form theory is an interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy that stresses the “truly social” character of capital’s essential categories. Commodities, value, and money are constituted through the activity of real people in their relations with one another, but they also mediate that same activity. In other words, capitalism is not an economic system but a historically peculiar form of society. Contrary to the claims of most liberals (both classical and “high”), it is a society with a single, overriding purpose: the accumulation of capital. To understand this claim, we must first take a brief tour of the key claims of value form theory.
Commodities, Value, and Money
According to this this approach, value is a socially-constituted category, a form of social practice distinctive to capitalism. Value mediates the contradictory unity of the production and exchange of commodities. In other words, it is not the case that value is added to goods through the spooky transfer of some kind of substance from worker to commodity. Value is social. Through a process taking place “behind the backs” of individuals, commodities that get sold are treated as having been produced through abstract, or social, labor; they are socially validated. The commensurability between commodities is possible only through the mediation of money—the necessary appearance of value. (“In their money-form all commodities look alike,” as Marx puts it.) Commodities that get sold—that are socially validated—are realized as exchange-values, their sale completing a phase in the endless pursuit of surplus value. It is through this (competitive and socially imperative) pursuit that capitalists seek to accumulate ever-greater quantities of capital. Meanwhile, a produced-but-unsold commodity remains socially unvalidated. Someone might need or want to use it; nevertheless, in a society where production is undertaken for the sake of capital accumulation, it is socially—and hence objectively—wasted and worthless.
In such a society, purchasing and selling commodities are compulsory activities; the only way that most wants or needs can be fulfilled is through buying things with money (assuming one has any). But although the scope of things that may be bought and sold is vast, the things that matter most have no value. Dignity, beauty, freedom as self-mastery rather than self-indulgence, biodiversity and robust ecologies—none of these can be produced and exchanged as commodities, meaning that they cannot serve as bases for the production of surplus value. Their production or preservation are matters of indifference to capital. The decisive factor determining whether anything gets produced at all is whether surplus value can be produced in the process, such that capital accumulation continues to occur. All other considerations take a back seat or are ignored. At the same time, there are overriding compulsions to use any and all available natural resources in the production of commodities—concerns about environmental devastation be damned.
Valuing Nature
The pervasive compulsion to accumulate capital is at the root of the social domination of nature currently propelling us toward the collapse of the biophysical foundations of our continued existence. Commodity production entails nature’s destruction through, inter alia, carbon emissions, pesticide-saturated crop monocultures, omnipresent pollutants, oceanic acidification, a world awash in plastics, and mass extinction. As Kirstin Munro has argued persuasively, the reproduction of our society is the reproduction of capital, meaning that “labor in capitalism—whether waged or unwaged—should not be viewed as the virtuous and morally enriching source of all wealth, but rather as a key input into the reproduction of capitalist society and its attendant social misery and environmental destruction.” Any ecologically-oriented politics that fails to grapple with this point will inevitably founder.
Battistoni’s argument is primarily critical rather than normative. She wisely declines to offer a grand unified theory of nature’s value. She focuses on the impersonal domination of capitalist society’s essential forms, not the ideologies or motivations of particular policy-makers, firms, or consumers. For Battistoni, the concept of the commodity and the concept of a sustainable social relationship with nature simply cannot mesh together. This brings her into tension with mainstream economic thought, in which the measurement of nature’s value is trivially simple. It is a straightforward exercise, proceeding from bog-standard marginalist premises, to argue that an objective valuation of nature can be found in the willingness of buyers to acquire non-human nature by purchasing chunks of it—typically for the sake of extraction or agriculture, but also for the purposes of conservation—as property. To the extent that a willingness to pay for property can be observed, the claim goes, we can know nature’s value.
But treating biomes, habitats, or populations as asset classes sidesteps questions about how non-human nature might have worth beyond its potential profitability. “If you put a whale in an aquarium tank,” Battistoni points out, you might turn a profit selling tickets for the chance to see it do tricks—but doing so “won’t feed ocean dwellers or stimulate phytoplankton growth.” And approaching conservation, remediation, or decarbonization in terms of the exchange of revenue-generating property entails that environmental stewardship is always vulnerable to being displaced by capital accumulation. As Battistoni notes, orangutans “cannot outbid palm oil producers to preserve the Indonesian rainforest” as a habitat rather than a site of extraction and exploitation.
Capital accumulation’s socially imperative character crowds out or precludes even the contemplation of how else we might conceive of value and valuing. The social domination of nature occurs through and is mediated by the commodity form, precisely because wealth appears in the form of commodities. Certain portions of non-human nature can be valued, but only when they are transformed into commodities in the course of the capitalist production process, and not as the material premises of our own social life. Other portions are not even commodifiable; the biological and physical processes subtending our existence are largely illegible to capitalist subjects qua capitalist subjects, and so are ignored or disdained even as they collapse. As Battistoni argues, “capitalism’s social relations fundamentally structure” the biosphere’s constituent processes, such that they exist only “as patches of recalcitrant matter within a largely commodified world.”
Knowledge and Freedom
Capitalist social relations are contradictory, but they are ultimately knowable. As Battistoni shows, they can be adequately grasped through immanent critique by the dominated and mediated subjects whose activity both produces and is conditioned by capital’s constitutive social forms. We can name the social cause of accelerating climate catastrophe: capital. This claim stands in sharp contrast to fashionable dross like the quietist notion of “polycrisis,” which disavows meaningful causal explanation and privileges a naïvely atheoretical empiricism, to the point of denying the central role of the social in the continual creation of our world. An insistence that the social is a domain so complex that it resists immanent, socially-embedded description expresses the consciousness of technocrats, bureaucrats, and any remaining ESG-minded shareholders—not of activists protesting concessions to oil majors, indigenous organizers resisting extractivism, or refugees fleeing the climate change-induced destruction of their homes. Climate change’s cause is truly social, and so the response to it must be as well. Struggling to avert climate catastrophe is one and the same with struggling to overcome capitalism—a “shared fight against the common structures that produce dispossession, repression, and exploitation,” as Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah have recently argued.
Free Gifts presents a profound challenge to reformist or legalistic approaches to understanding climate change that do not confront capital’s domination—namely, that capitalist society cannot regulate its way out of climate catastrophe. Battistoni avoids the mistake of tendering an abstract and formulaic answer to the question of what is to be done; we can look to actual struggles taking place right now for inspiration and instruction. And her emphasis on freedom—and the conditions that make the exercise of freedom possible and meaningful—is not only refreshing but necessary. Free Gifts’s quietly devastating lesson is that capitalism is incompatible with freedom. Climate change threatens us all while we continue to produce social domination (of each other and of non-human nature) through capital’s essential forms: commodities, value, and money. Surviving and mitigating climate catastrophe is possible only through emancipation from the unfreedom of capitalism.
