Review: ‘Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature’ By Alyssa Battistoni

Could capitalism’s impact on the planet be a result of “an accounting error” – the failure of our collective ability to recognize the value of nature’s services to our economy and way of life? In her new book, political economist Alyssa Battistoni examines this question through the lens of Marxist theory and with a deep dive into political and economic treatments of the topic.

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From the start of the book, Battistoni is precise in her choice of wording, clarifying what it means for nature to provide “free” gifts, not just gifts. This opening, laying the theoretical groundwork, prefigures the next several chapters, which discuss weighty questions such as the nature of choice, the impact of class rule, and the labor of nature versus that of man. 

The first half of the book is a dense read. While there are many fascinating examples provided (should oil be considered the product of plankton’s labor?), the bulk of the text is hard core theory of political economy, and will be of greatest interest to those with deep involvement in the field. These chapters offer a comprehensive review of how thinkers have examined capitalist rule, the nature of labor (are fishers laborers producing fish, or are they businesspeople?), and the social impact of pollution – the surplus matter of “byproduction”. 

Battistoni reminds the reader “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” because the costs always appear elsewhere in the system. “Pollution has often been described by its defenders as the ‘price of progress’, with the implication that it is worth paying,” she states. “Those who have actually paid the costs have often disagreed.” 

These insights and examples are the best aspects of the book, which presents a range of concepts that can take time to absorb. The author is a fan of inventing new terminology, including her core idea of “suprasumption”: “Where subsumption describes the ways that capital remakes both physical and social processes of labor in service of valorization, suprasumption describes the fact that both physical and social processes always exist in excess of that remaking.” She also coined, among others: “the naturalization thesis”, “market abjection”, “the worldview approach”, “the practico-actant”, “the abdication of production processes”, and “paracapitalist agents”.

A central chapter takes on the topic from a feminist perspective, and is a poignant reminder of how the “maintenance” work taken up by (Mother) Nature is as underappreciated as reproductive labor. “Why?” the author asks. “What, exactly, unifies ecological activity and reproductive labor as ‘background conditions’ or ‘maintenance work’? Why do these particular activities go unvalued, unaccounted, unpaid?”

From the midpoint onwards, the book becomes more practical and engaging. The author tackles the fundamental question of how to represent nature, including attacks against it, in economic terms – and what externalities reveal about markets. The concept of externalities, surprisingly, is older than one might think, with the kernels of its future definitions appearing in the early 20th century, while ecosystem services as a concept already appears in the late 19th century. “In classical political economy, natural agents appear as contributors to production, conventionally understood… but each of these is dependent on countless others that go unmentioned.”

According to the author, attempts to price nature have met with exasperating difficulty. The International Monetary Fund, for example, has valued a whale at $2 million each, an exercise that seems absurd until the alternative (capitalist’s default value of natural resources $0) is considered. “At every point in the development of methods for calculating nature’s economic value, beginning with the very earliest cost-benefit assessments, critics have emphasized their limits,” she points out. One study estimated the value of the Earth’s biosphere at $33 trillion – only to revise it, after criticism, to $125 trillion. 

Meanwhile, companies have been established on “natural capital”, proclaiming nature as an asset class. The future of these efforts is uncertain, but what is most striking today, the author points out, “is not the extent to which ecosystemic natures have been commodified, but the fact that they largely have not been.” 

The book concludes with a chapter examining the nature of freedom. Are we energy slaves? Would an ecologically sustainable society be an austere one? 

This book is not an instruction manual for someone wishing to set up a nature-based solutions company. Instead, it is a book for deep thinkers, who wish to delve into the ideas that have formed our society and are now remaking the physical planet we live on. By the end of the book, readers will be asking themselves, as the author does: “What else might freedom mean?”

Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature
Alyssa Battistoni, Ph.D
2025, Princeton University Press, 328pp

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