Marx and Sartre go shopping for a car

Also published on Resilience.

Why is it so difficult to find a job or to buy products that align with our values? Why is it difficult to even know whether our personal choices might have effects in the right direction?

In Alyssa Battistoni’s view, the separation of our intentions from the effects of our choices is a core feature of capitalism.

In this second post on Battistoni’s book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, we’ll look at what she identifies as one of the two key social relationships in capitalism: market rule. (Spoiler: the other key social relationship, class rule, is a major focus of the next post in this series.) In exploring market rule, Battistoni draws on insights from existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to extend older concepts of alienation.

Nearly every person alive is dependent on the market for some of the necessities of life at some point. For many of us that dependence approaches totality. Almost every morsel of food we eat, and every bit of clothing we wear, gets to us through market mechanisms. Our homes, our educations, our health care, our transportation, day care for our children – these are generally controlled to a lesser or (usually) greater degree by market interactions.

And what is the market? It is a system for determining the relative value – the price – of everything that is exchanged.

We each have our own judgments about the worth of a healthy and fresh-picked tomato compared to a handful of heavily seasoned packaged corn chips, or the worth of an hour’s work by a skilled nurse compared to an hour’s work by a skilled advertising copywriter. But our personal, individual judgments of worth are wholly irrelevant in the market.

That’s because the market “simultaneously atomizes and aggregates our decisions in ways that defy both individual and collective control.” (p. 57; all quotes are from Free Gifts unless otherwise noted)

Battistoni adds:

“Crucially, our motives have no bearing on these outcomes: markets are indifferent to our purposes, seeing only prices. In other words, they detach intentions from consequences.” (p. 62)

If I enter a store looking for a pair of jeans, I may or may not care whether the people who pick the cotton, spin the cotton, design the jeans, sew the jeans, ship the jeans, market the jeans, or sell me the jeans are fairly paid. And the market doesn’t care whether I care. What counts is whether or not I hand over my money for a pair of jeans, at a price set through a vast chain of other exchanges.1

It is difficult ranging toward impossible for me to know whether the other people in that chain of exchanges are fairly paid, let alone for me to influence their pay scales.

As Battistoni says, in the market “everyone is the abstract other to everyone else.” (p. 69)

Who’s responsible here?

Consider another example. Let’s scramble time, you and I, and go car shopping with Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre.

As we enter a North American dealership, we see that most of the vehicles on offer are huge – even bigger than the last time we went car shopping together. Most of the vehicles are SUVs and pickup trucks, and the current models are longer, heavier, and higher than corresponding models a decade or two ago.

Is this because most of our fellow consumers really value the ability to burn a lot of gas and emit the maximum amount of CO2? Do we each want to have the largest possible blind spots in front of the towering front ends of our personal passenger vehicles? Are we each keen to have a “best-in-class” ability to kill pedestrians if we run them down, or to inflict great danger to the occupants of the smaller cars on the road?

Not likely. We may merely be fashion-sensitive, eager to buy something that other buyers, clearly, think is an impressive car. We may not actually want a car at all – but we live in places where nearly every workplace, school or supermarket is hard to reach without a car. We might prefer a smaller, more economical car, but we fear we will be unsafe in a small car surrounded by much bigger cars.

These intentions don’t matter to the market. What matters is whether, in the end, we exchange our money for a set of keys and drive away as new car buyers. And then our act of purchase is just one in millions of data points aggregated by the market to determine price (and price, to the market, equals value).

So you and I, Marx and Sartre pile into our brand new SUV, and once we’ve decided whose phone will sync with the car’s infotainment system we drive away. But clouds of doubt quickly form at the edges of our euphoria.

From the back seat Karl’s voice competes with the GPS navigation prompts: “This is a marvelous product of industrial organization! But have the workers of the world united? Are they now the vanguard of the overthrow of capitalism?”

“Well … sort of … not exactly,” I say. “The workers who put together this car belong to one of the strongest unions. They have organized and fought and gone on strike many times over the years, and they’ve won good pay and even pensions.”

But you point out that most of the parts that went into the car were made in other factories … and the auto companies are building non-union factories wherever they can … and the raw materials were grown or mined or synthesized all over the world. And we have very little idea, really, which of the workers were well paid or which were barely paid at all, or who is living downwind or downriver of the mines and factories, suffering in ill health while we speed down the highway.

We go silent, until the ghost of Jean-Paul deepens our gloom. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. The four of us all want the world to be a better place, for everybody. But we just spent a lot of money for new wheels, and where is that money going? The fifty thousand dollars we spent might reward somebody who burns down rainforest to plant a rubber plantation. Our money might go to a lobbyist to get environmental regulations scrapped, or ignored. Just a few dollars may make it to kids who are dragging ore out of dangerous tunnels for fourteen hours a day. What are we supposed to do, just stop thinking and get some happy music playing?”

“Yes please!” we say.

“Give it a break already!”

“You’re overthinking things again!”

But that line never seems to work with J-P. So he goes on:

“I just don’t feel free. I should be able to take responsibility for my own decisions. And here I am, with good intentions, but I don’t know if I’m really fucking up the world by spending money this way. And you’re telling me to just stop thinking and listen to chill music? What kind of freedom is that?”

Living in bad faith

Sartre wrote about living in “bad faith” more than eighty years ago,2 and Battistoni sees this as an important concept today. For Sartre true freedom consisted in taking responsibility for one’s own decisions. By contrast, in Battistoni’s phrasing, “Bad faith consists in the denial of our freedom, the disavowal of our responsibility.” 

Why is bad faith a “normal” way of life in market-dominated society? Batttistoni writes:

“Under conditions of near-universal market dependence … in which nearly all our decisions are market mediated, nonresponsibility is pervasive – and the freedom that consists in being responsible for our decisions is radically elusive.” (p. 70)

So must we remain in bad faith? Only to the extent that we collude in denying our own freedom. We are in bad faith “when we refuse to countenance the possibility that things could be other than they are, or to examine the choices we make, whether alone or together …” (p 78)

Battistoni emphasizes that bad faith applies to more than individuals:

“Bad faith, crucially, is not only an individual condition. We are collectively in bad faith when we act as if we have no choice but to organize society in the way it is structured at present ….” (p. 79)

And since the market economy structures much of our relationship to the natural world, “we are in bad faith when we treat our socially specific relationships to the nonhuman world as if they were themselves natural.” (p. 79)

Before moving on, it’s important to note that market rule applies at all levels of society. Market rule restricts the possibilities for car buyers, but it also restricts car makers. It applies at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, in the middle, and also at the top.

A high-level auto executive, for example, may wish his company could sell more eco-friendly cars. But that wish will come to nothing if such cars can’t attract enough buyers at sufficiently profitable prices. The executive may wish to offer workers better job security, but he will be ushered out of the C-suite in a hurry if his company’s shares lose value on the stock market. The executive may lament, “the market doesn’t care a whit about my good intentions – so I’m really not responsible for my decisions.” And in simply accepting that “this is just the way things are”, the executive, too, is unfree and living in bad faith.

Photo at top of page: “Collins Oldsmobile, Indianapolis IN, 1971”, cropped from photo by Alden Jewell, licensed under CC By 2.0, accessed via flickr.

Footnotes

1 There are exceptions to the rule, which will be part of the discussion about getting beyond “bad faith” later in the series. In that discussion we’ll also bring in concepts from Simone de Beauvoir.

2 In L’Être et le néant, 1943, published in English as Being and Nothingness, 1956.

Labour, capital, and the ‘free gifts of nature’

Also published on Resilience.

Political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century employed a curious phrase to denote the source of wealth at the base of the economy: the “free gifts of nature.”

Alyssa Battistoni, a political science professor at Barnard College, believes that careful attention to the meanings of this phrase illuminates many aspects of the world we inhabit today.

Her book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton University Press, August 2025) is a brilliant study of topics including, but not limited to:

  • Marx’s theories of use value and exchange value
  • class rule and market rule;
  • organization and control of labour;
  • the roots of ecological economics;
  • debates about valuation of ecosystem services;
  • the Wages for Housework movement and recent theories of care work;
  • Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism;
  • freedom and unfreedom in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Free Gifts is not a quick or easy read, but as a guide to many of the most important issues in political philosophy this book is worth careful study. Each chapter builds on previous chapters to present a coherent and compelling vision.

This post begins a series on significant ideas in Free Gifts. Definitions of basic terms are essential, starting with “free”, “gifts”, and “nature”. Let’s take these keywords in reverse order.

What is nature? Is nature separate from humanity? Or is humanity, and all its works, part of nature?

In the framework Battistoni lays out in the opening chapter, we see “nature” as having two major components: non-human nature and human nature. All of humanity is part of nature, but not all of nature is human.

As such, every human activity is necessarily subject to non-human natural laws: for example, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. Human activity is also shaped by human norms and laws which are socially enacted.

Non-human nature is not necessarily shaped by human laws, and indeed throughout most of the history of the universe nature was entirely unaffected by human nature. Today, on the other hand, much of non-human nature on earth is deeply affected by human, socially-enacted activity. For example, the chemistry of the atmosphere and the physics of global heat absorption are now influenced by human activity.

Battistoni describes this conception of nature in these sentences:

“Rather than cordoning nature off from politics or abolishing the distinction altogether, this book starts from the premise that ‘nature’ pertains to politics of all kinds – not only those issues we tend to think of as ‘environmental.’ Instead of treating ‘politics’ as the organization of human life, to be distinguished from the scientific or technical organization of nonhuman matter, it holds that to organize human life is always also a material enterprise, and hence a natural one.” (Battistoni, page 8; except where otherwise noted, all quotes in this article are from Free Gifts)

Furthermore, because humans are social, our relationship with nature is shaped by human social relationships. In a capitalist society, the relationship between members of that society and nature – both human and non-human nature – is structured by capitalism. As explained more fully in later chapters of the book, “capitalism limits our ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free gift. It constrains our ability, individually and collectively, to make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the nonhuman world, and to take responsibility for those decisions.” (page 15)

So far … so good? I confess I found the opening section of Free Gifts slow going, and I had doubts about carrying on with what appeared at that point to be a very long book. But there was a pay-off – Battistoni used this carefully constructed conception of nature to good effect in ensuing chapters.

How about those other two key words, “gifts” and “free”?

It’s clear from the writings of early classical economists that they viewed non-human nature and its properties – the fertility of soil, the combustive potential of coal, and the forceful expansion of steam – as a gift, and a very important gift.

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing the gifts of nature embed us in relationships of reciprocity. In classical economics, by contrast, the gifts of nature are unilateral, imposing no conditions on the humans who take these gifts. That takes us part of the way to understanding the “free” in “free gifts”.

In short, capitalism pays no price for nature’s gifts even though these gifts are immensely valuable. Yet they are valuable in only one of two key senses of value: they have use value but not exchange value. (Exchange value comes into play only later, after they have been harvested, extracted, appropriated, and offered on the market.) Because they have no exchange value, the “free gifts” are free because they are priced at zero.

And with that, we’re deep into the weeds with Karl Marx.

Does the air have a price tag?

John (Fire) Lame Deer told a story with an important implication:

“I always remember listening to my first radio. That was in the little town of Interior [South Dakota] way back in the [nineteen] twenties. There was a sign over a door: ‘Listen to wireless music from Sioux Falls—300 miles away! $1.50 per person.’ You had to plunk that much down to be allowed inside this café to give your ears a treat. We saw a guy fooling around with a needle on a crystal and heard a tinny, crackling voice saying something about winter feed, corn, and the price of prime hogs. At that moment an old Indian spoke up. ‘They took the land and the water, now they own the air too.’ So we have the green frog-skin world in which all things have a price tag.” (Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, by John (Fire) Lame Deer with Richard Erdoes, Washington Square Press, 1971; page 35)

This story helps to illustrate how some gifts of nature have come to be exchanged in the market, while others, so far, have not.

In this case the radio receiver itself was still a scarce commodity, and so it was feasible for a small-scale capitalist to charge a price simply to listen. Meanwhile there were new methods of setting value for a previously mysterious phenomenon of physics. The waves in the electro-magnetic spectrum had been part of the free gifts of nature, existing throughout space for billions of years. But in the twentieth century it became possible to chop that spectrum into pieces that were sold on the market. Before that date the spectrum was valued at zero; after that date the spectrum had exchange value.

It may not have been exactly true that the air itself had a price tag – yet – but the radio waves that travel through that air were indeed becoming “owned”, bought and sold.

The air we breathe, the sun that warms us and allows plants to grow, the clouds that bring rain, the forests that cool the landscape and slow the passage of rainfall to the sea – these are immensely valuable, both to us and to non-human nature. These and myriad other natural phenomena have immense use value. But in themselves they have no exchange value unless and until they are exchanged, for the abstract expression of value that is money, on the market.

And it is this abstracted value – exchange value – that determines whether something is treated as valuable in capitalism.

Unless and until a particular gift of nature is traded on the market, its valuation and its price remains zero.

When formerly free – that is, priced at zero – gifts of nature are exchanged on the market, our human relationships to those gifts are transformed. Yet the prior natural characteristics of those gifts remain, and shape the practices of capitalism in their own ways. Coal burns with a specific amount of heat per kilogram and is easy to transport. Methane produces even more heat per kilogram, but as an expansive gas it is tricky to transport. Dried spruce wood pellets can be combusted to produce a lot of heat, but the trees take decades to grow. Specially selected dairy cows produce a lot of milk each day for a period of months. But their lactation cycles are determined by a complex of biological factors that are only partially malleable by capitalist management.

All these physical and biological properties shape how capitalism extracts value when the free gifts of nature are brought into production processes. Of equal importance, the properties of non-human nature are important in determining which gifts of nature are not brought into capitalist production processes:

“[Capitalism’s] ability to wring profit out of every entity, activity, and process on Earth has often been overstated. Although capital seeks to absorb what it can make profitable, it abdicates that which it can’t. It doesn’t only appropriate and exploit; it also abandons and expels.” (p 47-48)

* * *

While capitalism enforces a particular relationship between humanity and the rest of nature, it likewise perverts our freedom and ensnares us in specifically capitalist forms of unfreedom. As Battistoni notes in the book’s epilogue, ending capitalist unfreedom would not necessarily bring about a better world, but it would “allow us to make different kinds of decisions than the ones capitalism offers.” (p 239)

Battistoni enlists the help of Jean-Paul Sartre in elucidating the character of capitalist unfreedom. We’ll delve into that conversation in the next post.

Photo at top of page: “Underground uranium mining in Nucla (Montrose County, Colorado)”, photo by Bill Gillette, 1972, public domain, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.