In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value the natural world. Yet the lesson of this exploration is much broader: that capitalism imposes fundamental limits on our collective freedom.
Environmental harms are often cast as externalities, even by those seeking to emphasize their urgency. Yet the major modern environmental statutes, written before America’s neoliberal turn toward Coasean thinking, expressly rejected the use of economic analysis in designing pollution regulation. What does this history teach us, and how might our thinking shift if we rejected the idea that climate change is best thought of as an externality?
Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts argues that capitalism limits our freedom to decide how to value the nonhuman world. Politics, as the domain in which we choose the terms of our collective life, has a special role to play in moving beyond these limitations. But what is Battistoni’s conception of politics, and how big is the effective space that the turn to politics opens up for such choice?
Under capitalism, the social domination of nature occurs through and is mediated by the commodity form. 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. 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.
While capitalism is typically said to commodify everything, much of what makes up our world isn’t commodified at all. It instead appears as a free gift: a social form that describes the condition of usefulness lacking value. The idea of the free gift can give us a deeper understanding of the environmental problems that plague contemporary capitalism. It can also help us better understand capitalism itself.
Antitrust may promise to tame corporate power, but it leaves untouched the deeper logic of capitalism that compels production for profit’s sake. In this sense, antitrust is not voluntarist enough, choosing to fight capital with one hand tied behind its back. At the same time, however, antitrust places too much faith in law as a source of normative authority and in an administrative state whose legitimacy is evaporating before our eyes.
Even as the Trump administration seeks to dismantle DEI in the name of “merit,” the law it distorts still harbors possibilities for resistance. Title VII prohibits retaliation against employees who oppose discrimination, and workers purged for their past DEI efforts should consider pursuing retaliation claims against their employers. Such lawsuits would raise the costs of anticipatory capitulation, while also providing some measure of relief to workers already harmed.
By weaponizing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the Trump administration is using antidiscrimination law to protect privilege and entrench inequality. Yet rather than uniting to resist these sham investigations, college and university leaders have acted in isolation, allowing fear and fragmentation to erode the principles at the heart of higher education.
In the fall of 2023, the Department of Education launched more antisemitism investigations into colleges and universities than in all previous years combined. This record was surpassed in 2024 and is on track to be broken again in 2025. While the Biden administration wielded these investigations as a cudgel to crush student-led protests in support of Palestine, Trump has turned them into a battering ram in his attempt to remake American higher education.
Antitrust law is important not only for its potential in reforming our current economic system, but also analytically, because of law’s irreducible role in structuring economic competition and coordination. Contra any picture of markets operating via quasi-automatic mechanisms, the organization and operations of any market are as much a product of contingent rules as any law of nature.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. Today, however, it has become one of the most powerful forces against desegregation. How did this vertigo-inducing inversion come about? And how might we prevent similar civil rights perversions in the future?
We reach into the vault and highlight some of our favorite posts on the entanglements between criminal law, political economy, and social inequality. Featuring Angela Harris, Noah Zatz, Jocelyn Simonson, Joanna Schwartz, Anthony O’Rourke, Guyora Binder, Rick Su, Zohra Ahmed, Dorothy Roberts, Judah Schept, Andrew Crespo, and Amna Akbar.
How should we understand the relationship between Marxism and antitrust? To what extent do these traditions involve conflicting methods and assumptions? And, despite their differences, can we imagine a constructive give and take, where the two intellectual programs nonetheless align into a useful division of labor?
Recent public initiatives to manufacture insulin highlight both the promise and pitfalls of the new politics of “abundance.” Although states are capable of producing high-quality, affordable medicines, these efforts inevitably face resistance from powerful private interests. Without recognizing this as a central obstacle and building the political will to overcome it, plans to expand public production, in healthcare or elsewhere, are unlikely to succeed.
Powerful health care companies shape the informational environments around their products. As part of this playbook, companies avoid or thwart the generation and dissemination of accurate information on the true value of their products. Consequently, Americans spend too much on health care with dubious or even negative value.
