"On Nature's Free Gifts": Alyssa Battistoni in conversation with Andrés Saenz de Sicilia

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 this event, Alyssa Battistoni will explore capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature. She argues 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 – in other words, how some things come to have value under capitalism, and how others do not. She builds on the idea of the free gift of nature, what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. Over different instances of the free gift in political economic thought and new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers (Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, Ronald Coase), this event will explore the view that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and invite us to imagine how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts.

Alyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of political science at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her research interests are environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and the history of political thought. Her last book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, was published by Princeton University Press in August 2025.

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and managing director of The Philosopher. His book Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society was published by Brill in 2024.

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