Free gifts is a 2025 book by Alyssa Battistoni on capitalism , environment and freedom. A dissection of capitalism mostly through a Marxist angle but with an existentialist twist.

Summary

The starting point of the book is the analysis of nature as “free gift”. How nature doesn’t fit in the concepts of work, capital or commodity. Nature cannot get a wage nor become a commodity without human work, so it is a free of value thing that we call free gift.

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In the quest to set a value for nature, there are some freedom obstacles caused capitalism. The two constraints that the author highlights are class struggle and market unfreedom.

Markets in particular are very effective at setting the value for us as an aggregation of supply and demand that doesn’t allow to set a real value by ourselves, restricting our freedom [[]]

Some people claim that they work outside this capitalism framework. The book uses the example of mushroom pickers and fisheries as professions that can’t be fully subsumed by capitalism and its automation. However she makes very clear that they are still part of the same system, with capitalism setting the value of the goods that they extract.

The main reason these arrangements happen is that capitalism can’t fully conquer these fields.[[]]

Another aspect of the free gift that the author focuses on is pollution. She argues that it is a byproduct of capitalist production and is also treated the same way: as a 0 value object. [[]]

Similarly, most of the reproductive and caring work that mostly women do is also capitalist influenced but not fully absorbed. She argues that care is hard to optimise so they suffer from cost disease. These jobs support capitalism while not being rightly valued, and sometimes even set at 0 value [[]]

All of these factors converge into the climate crisis and the loss of freedom. The solutions that this book offers are not new, not that they could be. It has to be politics, people setting the value of things that capitalist markets can’t or won’t . [[]]

And from the freedom perspective, to learn to live within the limits that handling nature properly would impose. [[]]

Thoughts

This is an incredible book. It takes the simple premise of defining free gifts to explore many aspects of capitalism and its imposition on us by us.

It is both encouraging and crushing. The book encourages everyone to find agency through freedom in the existential sense. It is crushing as it outlines the impossibility of finding solutions within markets or monetary systems.

These limitations are inherent to markets as a method to set values, to decide what matters. It is also limited by its power. Not everything can be fully commoditised.

In many ways it is a different account of Marx alienation, charged with the individual freedom and struggle described by existentialist philosophers. A reiteration of the necessity of nature as the commons.

I personally feel the struggle in many ways. It really doesn’t matter to buy green stuff or buy less stuff while the markets will use that to simply alter prices in infinitesimal ways, beyond myself. My work contributes to better market allocation which increases extractive forces efficiency. It is a battle that can’t be won from within the market.

This change of perspective is accompanied by numerous references to philosophers, economists and climate experts. While staying relatively accessible and grounded.

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