Skip to content
LPE Originals

Facing the Limits

By

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.
LPE Originals

Is Climate Change an Externality?

By

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?
LPE Originals

What Can Politics Make of Nature?

By

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?
LPE Originals

When Nature is Worthless

By

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.
LPE Originals

In the Shadow of Commodification

By

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.