Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature w/ Alyssa Battistoni

In this episode we speak with Alyssa Battistoni about her most recent book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature published back in August 2025 by Princeton University Press.Alyssa is a political theorist with research interests in environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and the history of political thought. She is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal published by Verso in 2019. We highly recommend reading both of these books, found here: Free GiftsA Planet to Win Battistoni writes frequently for publications including the Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, n+1, and Boston Review, and is on the editorial boards of Jacobin and Dissent. She received her PhD from Yale in 2019 and previously held the position of Environmental Fellow at Harvard University.  This episode explores the political work done by the idea that nature is either “inside” or “outside” the production process. We unpack how nature can function as a so-called free gift to capital, how it is sometimes strategically left alone in order to remain cheap or undervalued, and how it is, at other times, simply resistant to capture—unruly, uneven, and not fully governable by capitalist logics. Drawing on feminist political economy and eco-feminist thought, Alyssa reflects on what these traditions make visible—and where they fall short. We talk about how capitalism defines economic value, what counts as productive activity, and how vast realms of work are rendered invisible or treated as “free,” whether implicitly or explicitly. This leads us into a discussion of externalities, not only as technical economic categories, but as deeply political mechanisms that displace responsibility, undermine democratic decision-making, and fracture possibilities for collective action.A key thread running through the conversation is the insistence that nature works. It labors. It is not a passive backdrop or inert input, but a dynamic ensemble of living beings, processes, and labor the fruits of which are routinely appropriated by capital. While capital recognizes only waged labour as work, Alyssa draws a careful parallel between feminist critiques of unwaged reproductive labour and the unwaged labour performed by nature while also pushing against some of the limits of these analogies, and asking what they obscure as much as what they reveal.This conversation only scratches the surface of the richness and density of Free Gifts. It’s important to mention this as we live through content overload and informational overstimulation, we want to be clear that this episode is an entry point, not a substitute. If you’re able to, we strongly encourage you to read the book and support Alyssa’s work. I am joined by my colleague Nick Gottlieb. Thanks for being part of this, Nick! :) If this episode resonates, please share it with others who might find it generative as well.