Invitation to Alyssa Battistoni's new book: Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, Oct. 6, online

[Nicole Moller gonzalez]

Dear all,

Apologies for cross-posting.

The Trade Union and Labour Environmentalism Network (TULE – https://tulelabour.org) is hosting a book talk with Alyssa Battistoni on her recently released book:  Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature.

Speaker Bio: Alyssa Battistoni is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. She works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in modern social and political theory. Her book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature was published by Princeton University Press in August 2025. Other academic work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Nomos. She is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos. 

About the Book: Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.

Event details:

 Date: Oct 6th
 Time: 3:00pm EST

 Register: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/bdveqvUsQ-iQD5_ePvkN_Q

For more information, visit the events section of our website: tulelabour.org/events