Interview: Alyssa Battistoni

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Let’s start with something pretty simple, or perhaps not so simple — what is a free gift?

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

A free gift is, I would argue, is a capitalist social form like the commodity. It’s something that has the dual character we associate with the commodity, but it has a use value that doesn’t appear as exchange value. Therefore, it has a strange position in the system that is mostly organised by commodity exchange and where most of the things we acquire either to consume or as inputs into production, including human labour are things that are bought and sold. The structuring form of life in a capitalist society is buying and selling commodities, and for capitalists producing things with an eye towards accumulating abstract value.  

The free gift of nature is an odd thing that doesn’t show up in that form, that seems to resist commodification, but that still has that concrete use value. It exists in the material world. It's still doing stuff in the material world, sometimes it's doing stuff that's helping — that's contributing to production or reproduction or something like that. Sometimes it's doing other things that are not so beneficiary. But it's this basic paradox of material effects that useful but material effects that don't appear in the forms of abstract value of capital. I would say that it's how nature appears in capitalism.  

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What is nature? How does the way that capitalism makes or sees nature differ from other forms of nature or other ways of seeing or making nature?  

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

Nature is, famously, one of these very difficult words. As Raymond Williams told us, the most complicated word in the language. I use it in a couple of senses in the book.

One is thinking of nature as the material world, basically, thinking about the stuff of the world and the physicality of the world as some sense of nature. Another is thinking about “non-human nature”. I try to say non-human nature when I’m thinking about non-human nature because, obviously, we need to understand human beings and our physicality and continuity with that kind of broader material world. One of the questions the book tries to investigate is why there is such a strong distinction between human labour and other kinds of entities within capitalism — why human labour takes on this distinct quality. So, trying to think about non-human nature as the stuff that isn’t human, and why that’s quite a weird category to have — everything that’s not human becomes nature, and then it’s just us on the outside. I think that is actually pretty odd because the things we think about as nature are quite different from one another. The things that are grouped under that category are pretty broad.

So, I try to think about those two things, and to think about the free gift of nature as the particularly capitalist social relation of nature — the way that these entities show up in a capitalist system. So, it’s not nature in general. The distinction I want to draw there is nature as free gift in a capitalist society, but we wouldn’t have to treat it this way in any form of life.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

One thing that I was struck by is how your account differs from other recent theorisations of the interface of nature and capitalism is theorised, which is typically as a relation of dependency, like in Nancy Fraser’s for instance. In those types of account, there is a risk that nature is both out and inside of capitalism. The other account of nature that you spend time distinguishing yours from is a worldview one which is an accidentally or inadvertently idealist one, inasmuch as it leans too heavily on the causal effects of ideology. How does your approach differ from those, especially as relates to the internal dynamics or mechanics of capitalism?

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

I think they’re two helpful foils. Nancy Fraser’s work — I think we share a lot in terms of arguments and analysis, but I do think there's a difference there too, in what she talks about as background conditions or looking beyond Marx’s hidden abode or the sense that there are a set of backgrounds that are non-economic, which then brings in this in-and-out element. I am trying to move away from that frame because I find it difficult to really delineate the inside-outside and trying to can produce an overly coherent sense of things — that there is a stable sphere of what nature is or reproduction is or even politics. And that these are existing entities that are in the background and then capitalism is in the foreground. What I’m interested in is how the social relations of capital move through the world and how they encounter different kinds of nature or labour processes, and not to say in advance whether those are nature or social or production or reproduction. I try to treat it a bit more continuously and show how that movement through the world actually produces these categories.

That foreground-background model can almost stylise the coherence of a real or a sphere. I think reproduction is the best example of this. It’s implicit to the argument that reproduction is always in the background and always doing this set of things. This can create a transhistorical view of reproduction, rather than seeing it as a category internal to and produced by capitalism. That’s where I would differ from Nancy’s work.  

My view also departs from the “worldview model”, which I think is quite pervasive in environmental studies and also held by some eco-marxists and work on capitalist nature. The idea there is that the problem we need to solve is why we see nature the way we do. A lot of analysis starts from the problem of Cartesian dualism, which has become a boogieman in environmental scholarship. The idea is: Cartesian dualism created this, it instigated this separation between the thinking human subject and the dumb matter of the world. That idea has been reproduced over and over. We can have a critique of Cartesian dualism — that’s all well and good. But when it operates as through these concepts, which includes sometimes the perception of nature by Western societies — as if that is the driving force of our problematic relationships in the non-human world, or that we have lost the more relational view that many Indigenous societies have — then that's at the level of ideas, perspectives, worldviews or something like that. This suggests that what we would need to do to fix it would be to get the right view, to see nature in the right way, correct our vision somehow, and this can become a moral project, too. If we only came to realise that nature is another way, we would be able to relate to differently. It ends up being a pretty idealist approach even when used by people who are otherwise developing a Marxist or materialist analysis — it can end up standing in as a sort of causal mechanism for things that I think are better explained by why we are compelled to act in these ways towards nature in a capitalist world. To locate it not at the level of wrong attitudes but at the level of the mechanisms of daily life in a capitalist society that compel you to constantly devalue nature.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

I hope we’ll come back to ideology later, but for now, it seems important that it appears in some of these accounts as something standalone or free-floating. And it’s exactly as you just put it — it’s as if the changing of opinion is, or would be, the changing of the world. Of course, there can be different and more sophisticated accounts of how “thought” and “world” relate but this freestanding version seems to posit that we ourselves stand outside of the constraints on our thinking and attributes far too strong a causal role to a detached or disembedded account of ideology. The move you make is a very compelling one — rematerialising.  

My question here, and particularly in light of the idealist traps you’ve just outlined — what is material? It’s a word that’s often used extremely shallowly, like a sort of spoken confetti, to mean “the thing I have already taken to be important”, especially and circularly in political arguments. But your account puts the material back into the material — explaining and putting attention to how these abstract laws or capital’s social relations move through the world and rearrange it and how these play out concretely in different places. I wonder if you could say a bit more about “material” and rematerialising.

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

I agree with you that “material” is deployed quite widely. Some of what I wanted to do was to get at why I felt frustrated with many otherwise materialist accounts. And materialist means to pay attention to political economy, basically. But a lot of work does that in a way that ends up being somehow weirdly immaterial, because of a focus on the abstract laws or tendencies of capital. I felt like a lot of otherwise materialist and historical materialist work felt weirdly immaterial when it came to the thinking about “what is getting made out of what?”. Where is the nature happening here? There is nature going into these production processes and stuff that's coming out and matter that’s being transformed and all of these sorts of things, but that’s not always obvious from the analysis.  

I wanted to bring a sense of the physical world back into the useful and valuable parts of Marxist theory, especially value form theory which tends to emphasise this move towards the abstract (abstract time, abstract labour, abstract value), all of which is important, but as we know, capital continues to operate in this very physical world and when you’re thinking about you know environment and nature, you have to be kind of concerned with that.  

I think, more generally, in a lot of social theory there is of problem of moving away from the physical or material world and the response in a lot of quarters has been the new materialist move, which is to just be very naïve, in a way, to look at matter qua matter, without also thinking about social relations, and that’s a very strong overcorrection, I would say. But we need that level of materiality paired with the classic Marxist analysis and critique of social relations: asking why this content takes this form. How do we put that question back together?  

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

One of the places you start putting it back to together is in a way the most and least likely spot: the “standard workplace”, in which there are two free gifts you located. These are social cooperation and the sort of machinery or the material that's worked on or with. I wonder if you could talk through what kind of processes you have in mind when it comes to rematerialising in that case? Which I take to mean looking at the concrete through the knowledge we have, as Marxists, of the abstract laws and the forms, in that typical and unusual location: the workplace.

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

The book probably starts in a slightly unusual place — the industrial workplace, which has often been seen as sort of like the enemy of nature, the place where nature goes to die. This is not where you would do the typical analysis of capitalism in nature, which is often looking at the natures which are supposedly getting destroyed by capitalism. I think one of the things I want to say in the book is that, in general, nature is central to Marxist thought writ large, it’s not just in the ecological moments; questions about nature are foundational. If we think about the sense of nature, as material stuff in the world, of course nature is, then, everywhere in political economy. Then we can do the usual move — into the hidden abode — and find a bunch of nature in there and free gifts of nature too, not only look at resources but to look at how the organisation of nature ends up generating these gifts of nature.  

I try to think about both. There are places where Marx talks about this cross-production — things that operate as gifts and just for nature. He talks about machines as these entities which do their work for nothing, like natural forces that exist without human changing. He also talks quite interestingly about human labour and cooperation — the cooperation of human labourers, by which, the simplest way to put it would be that they are more than the sum of their parts. When people cooperate, they generate these new capacities and are able to do things that no individual person can do and that might be because they’re coordinating across time and space or because they are developing new techniques or new forms of knowledge, but this an emergent capacity, organising social labour. Within capitalism it is a free gift to capital — capital is capturing this emergent productive, socially productive, power of labour.  

That’s an important insight for a couple of reasons. If we think about these gifts together — it’s really important for understanding how capital organises and controls labour and production processes because I think one of the goals of capital expansion to increase those free gifts, to develop new, more cooperative forms to make cooperative labour more efficient and then to capture the gains of that. That is a process that involves reorganising the labourers and their relationships with one another and also reorganising the natural or the non-human elements of production into ever more complex forms of machinery. When you look at how capital does both of these things to capture more and more of these two free gifts, I think we can see how the forms of control that capital exerts over labour end up taking quite material forms, how they rearrange matter and labour to generate the most surplus. That is usually talked about in terms of subsumption. It’s a social process, but it’s also quite physical. Capital is literally going in and reorganising the way that basic goods are produced.  

Once we have that kind of material lens, I think we can see, or once we bring that lens onto matter and labour and their reorganisation, we can differentiate between the different kinds of matter that are going into these processes, and look at a different set of them for different commodity production. And that’s important, these physical processes — how labour processes develop and what kinds of control capital is able to exert within them.

Materials and nature go into those processes, and some are not as amenable to remaking. I try to look at what I call nature-based sectors, which is a bit of a misnomer because all sectors are nature-based, but I mean where there is higher interaction with organic matter. Organic matter operates on its own timelines, more than dead matter, which can be entirely manipulated and controlled.  

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

One thing that stands out there is that in all cases, even the most highly controllable or work environment or activity environment, however, want to put it, there’s still this unruliness of the organic, the presence of its own timelines, which make this kind of friction free application or following through of the abstract laws or tendencies less possible — the abstract laws catch or snag on the organic.

There’s a response in some sectors that you describe as capital’s abdication of rule — where that teeming organicness cannot be organised. It’s not that such sectors are temporally or geographically outside of capitalism, but that there is a certain unruliness — whether that’s because of relational or social aspects or properties of the organic matter—that makes them harder to be worked on. Could you say a bit more about those sectors?

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

Why do we see capital being really present in some sectors more than others, and how do we answer this without again reverting to the sense that there is background or that are there are something that are “non-economic”, or that there is an outside of capitalism?  

There is a material world, there are capital social relations, and some of things end up being capitalised and industrialised and so on, and others don’t. Why is that not because some of them are just “non-capitalist” or are leftovers from other modes of production? In the book, some of this is also trying to intervene in some of the debates around small- scale agriculture and peasantry and how these are sectors that have not been absorbed by capital. I want to say that there are certain sectors where there persistent natural barriers to that — Marx is talking about the real subsumption of production, the total reorganisation, but just wage labour, but the reorganisation of the labour process towards maximum efficiency, usually introducing machinery, speeding up and other classic productivity gains where machines manage the work process, all the things we associate with industrialisation. There are sectors where this is not going to happen: crops grow only a certain time of year or only in certain kinds of soil, or it takes a long time for a tree to grow. In these cases, basic biophysical processes end up being snags for capital and leaving these sectors low-productivity ones. They’re not as good investment propositions — you’re not going to get as high a return on your investment as you would elsewhere. This is where the abdication comes in — capital declines to invest, to undertake that full process of real subsumption because it’s not worth it.

That’s a broader argument of the book — we have to really think about how capitalism is: we’re not just not looking at the commodity and commodification as the sole process, it’s not absorbing new things and bringing everything in, rather than we live in a capitalist totality, of which everything is part, but not everything is equally turned into a site of value accumulation. This includes places where capital decides it’s not worth it organising the labour process. Capital does operate there, of course, typically at the level of exchange, as a merchant, or middleman or buyer. You see this in small-scale agricultural sectors, like fish, coffee, cacao, where there are a lot of small producers who have to deal with all these things about nature. They have to deal with biological cycles and the uncertainty of whether they will catch any fish. Maybe there will be a weather disaster and they’ll lose all their crops. All of the things that make it risky. And then the person who benefits is often these conglomerates that just buy up all of the cacao or the agribusiness companies that make the seeds or fertilisers — the industrial producers. Capital’s operating at a different level there from in the classical account or case.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

I think that leads well to two related questions, which I’ll combine. Firstly, what are the political stakes of getting it right? That’s not the same question as “what is to be done [with X insight]”, importantly. The second question is what can political theory do to help movements, because it probably cannot answer what should be done type questions, but your book, and I think this is right, seems to be make the case implicitly that there is a possible contribution and one that might be related to “getting it right”.

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

I hope so. It’s not a programmatic or political strategy book but it is a how do we need to understand these things book, at some level of distance from immediate political strategy. I do think and hope it has some political stakes. One is in trying to shift our view or perspective or where an anti-capitalist environmental politics or politics of nature is to be found, and that there are elements of thinking about nature and what we call “environment” often in basically every kind of struggle we can imagine, not just sectors most typically seen as relevant to the environment. That all production processes are connected to nature because of that interaction, and that this has effects in particular sectors too and this helps us better understand those sectors where labour tends to take unusual forms of discipline or piece rates and so on. The politics of nature are everywhere in a way that lots of environmental type politics hasn’t understood and that we should understand them as at least potentially anti-capitalist politics or having a critique of capitalism within them.

One example is the chapter on social costs and how economists have thought about pollution, in which I say that the way we’ve tended to think about this problem of pollution from the left has been as environmental justice — a critique of the harms produced by production and pollution and toxic waste and things are sort of unjustly distributed across communities, and that work is really important, but I’m trying again to make the move to say it’s not just about the distributive problem, we need to look at production, to try to understand how this this is a politics or a problem rooted in production and who has control over production and what compels certain forms of direction, and again, some of these classic analyses of capitalism and class. This might not change the kinds of struggle that happen but will allow us to see things more clearly or differently what those struggles might be doing. When people are mobilising against toxic waste, to really highlight that this is a problem rooted in, that we trace back to capital, to what capital is doing. This might help locate a shared enemy — a shared critique and target. These are not new social movements distinct from class struggles, they end up looking quite a lot like the traditional politics of something like labour.

We need to think what the institutions and forms and structures to develop a politics that could approximate or sort of replicate some of the sort of classic labour-oriented models of left politics, of course, but these are not so different. Again, it’s not about what we should do and more about how there are resources for a genuinely mass eco-socialist political project out there, and that we have to think about where and what those are rather than continuing with this model where the politics of the environment is this little corner for environmental and climate activists.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

It’s a difficult question too — it’s hard to predict what might happen as a result of thinking. One thing I found really exciting about your book was the discussion of freedom. Firstly, the fact of talking about freedom at all and secondly, the resources you drew on to (Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre) think situated freedom. I wonder if there’s a way of distinguishing that kind of freedom compared to social freedom or immanent freedom or any other ways of cashing out how freedom might be used, because I think there’s something distinctively and interestingly “humanist” there which is very interesting.  

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

There are a few dimensions to it. Probably the most important one is that I don’t see it opposed to something like a more classic social freedom view or model but I what I appreciate about de Beauvoir is the way that she is attentive to the unresolvedness of freedom. The unresolved character of genuine freedom — that it doesn’t mean once we’re free we all recognise ourselves and in this official world that we have created and sort of signed up to and built and constituted. Hopefully, we do, but there’s always this quite strong possibility that people will not and will question that, will change their minds and reassess things. There’s this element of renegotiation, that’s processual. There will not be a stable stopping point where we have achieved social freedom, where we’re living in this harmonious world where everyone recognises themselves and the labour they’re doing, and they feel they’ve fully signed up to or accepted the structures and conditions in terms of life. I mean maybe that’s a bit of a caricature of classical Hegelian social freedom, but I do think that it has often frustrated me — those imaginations of the world where we have finally achieved social freedom, and it is this kind of utopic, a world where everyone’s individual will and the social totality is like perfectly aligned. I think existentialism gets characterised, unfairly, as very individual. There’s still something important about that free people would probably be unreconciled — would continue to grapple with and struggle with one another over the conditions of their lives and what they’re doing, both in relation to their own desires and actions but also in response to a changing world.  

Climate change is one of those changing situations we have a lot of think through and figure out and be reassessing our world and challenging ourselves and trying to respond to it in new ways. That’s daunting in a sense, it’s unrelenting, there’s not a stable point beyond the realm of necessity where we can say “okay, we’re good now, we’re chilling in freedom. We’re just doing the things that are good in themselves”. You’re constantly in a state of having to assess whether you’re doing the right thing — but that’s also very powerful and also true about human collective life. I like that non-utopian, ongoing project rather than a destination.  

The situatedness gives a bit more, especially in Beauvoir, and her thinking about. Reading her as a feminist thinker I really appreciate her position that allows you to move from these two poles on which feminists go ashore on — biological essentialism and social constructivism — to a way of navigating materiality but as a social relation, as a problem of work and think through. It’s quite useful for thinking about the freedom of any given person or collective group of people, how that will be both enabled and constrained by the material world, and how we can attend to that in a more concrete sense than classical theories of social freedom permit. It allows us foreground aspects that I think are very important for thinking about how do we imagine ourselves to be material embodied mortal beings living in a world of other kinds of things and beings that we do not control and that we have to figure out how to relate to, especially on a changing planet.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How does capitalism and how does climate crisis make us unfree?  

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

I think capitalism makes us unfree in general, and with respect to nature, compels us to treat nature as a free gift. We can’t get out of that relationship. We can’t just decide that we think nature is really valuable and we should treat it totally differently. We are compelled in our daily life and actions. I try to talk about this fact through the ways that class power and the broader way of relating through the market thwart and inhibit our ability to choose values for ourselves to choose the world we want to make for ourselves. It’s an account  

of capitalism making us unfree that is trying to get at both what people have talked about in terms of “class domination” or the power of one group of people over another, and as what’s often referred to as abstract or social domination, by the market, that we are helpless in the face of these forces aggregating our individual actions, driving our individual actions, channelling them, producing outcomes that are our totally out of control, and that nobody wants to happen but that happen anyway. I think this is part of what produces a sense of helplessness when people think about climate change, the sense of powerlessness that people often articulate.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

That feeling of powerlessness, I feel very strongly, because I find it extremely terrifying to think about the climate. So, I was very grateful for a method which brought the problem into view. Not that it soothed my anxieties! That wouldn’t be the right thing.

I wanted to ask what you thought about that personal domination. Republicanism has a had a big revival, in which something like a non-liberal form of liberty is theorised, including in more socialist or Marxist directions. Can you distinguish your freedom from theirs? Are they incompatible? Does it matter if so? And I suppose I wonder if there’s a sort of slightly anti- or non-normative aspect to this. By which I mean, I read you as not being interested in finding out the Truthful Theory of Freedom, but more about figuring out the best account of a problem that allows us to understand and to act, especially given our partiality, our situatedness, all the other things that limit what we can know and do. So, there’s an implicit question there, too, which I’ll make explicit — is your work, and Marx’s — moral and/or normative?  

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

I struggled for a while with trying to make republicanism work because I find a lot of it compelling and exciting. That labour is dominated by capital and that this is a crucial and often overlooked sort of site of domination and of capitalist society is really is great and powerful. And that injunction against domination and arbitrary power over others can actually do a lot. It’s often seen as pretty minimal but I think if you follow it through has pretty significant consequences. For a while I was trying to make an argument that might be possible to pose in republican/non-domination terms. Non-domination can get you some way — with, for example, pollution as imposed on others, that you can do these things that will transform others’ lives that unilaterally and arbitrarily imposed on them. Perhaps this is compatible but a friendly addendum. I think republican freedom has a couple of shortcomings for at least some of the things that I’m interested in.  

One is the sense of the material that we’ve been talking about in relation to social freedom. Its freedom is a social freedom, and that’s all well and good — freedom is a social category. But I think trying to think the situatedness that tends to open these questions of what we need as embodied creatures to realise our freedom is important, and also very live for Marx, and that seems missing. The second is a friendly push to cash out these arguments a bit more. Could you have a workplace without domination but where production was not changed that much? If you had a non-dominated workplace, work would look entirely different, production would look like entirely different. Many things about our world would look very, very different in ways that would be challenging, would there be industrial production at all. How much would we need to reorder the material world to change the social relations. Then, third, is that while republicanism is great for thinking about labour, and more interpersonal accounts of domination, or its interpersonal class aspects, but it’s very hard to apply to social domination or abstract domination. In fact, it could be quite pro-market — it’s quite difficult to make the republican account work for social domination, which I think is important to have a full theory of capitalist domination. Some people have tried to tweak it on those lines, but I have found them unconvincing so far. So, we need a different way of thinking about freedom.

Existentialism allows us to think valuation — that is the whole question for existentialism. What are values? How do we value things? What is valuation? So, we have a critique of capitalist value, not just how capital is treating workers or overriding individual people's wills, but how are we valuing things in this world, an account of the freedom to value things and to determine one’s values. But I’m definitely not antagonistic to republican freedom, I think we need other stuff too. Nothing has to be a total theory of freedom — it’s fine to have multiple accounts of freedom that do different work.

As for Marx and morality. I’m allergic to a lot of moral critiques of capitalism that I think are also very significant in environmental spheres and probably more prevalent in environmental critiques than elsewhere. There is a lot of moralisation of nature in environmental work. At the same time, I would certainly say there’s some kind of normative project in Marx, one that is more open-ended. I do think freedom is normative in some sense, as a virtue or value, as far as Marx has one, that’s what it is. But in general, I’m trying to use Marx as a jumping-off point rather than as a be-all and end-all textual reference, and so to say, these are the kinds of questions and problems and things that we should be looking at and ways to approach them and think about them but we can also develop things in new directions. There’s a normative project of some sort there and I guess my own normative project is to articulate a critique of what is wrong with capitalism, a kind of negative normativity or a critique, but without that having to be necessarily paired with the normative positive programme or solution. I don’t think political theorists need to be prescribing answers to people but we do need to articulate why this matters.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What text (broadly defined) would you recommend or is your favourite in relation to the topics of this interview, so work and nature (broadly defined again).  

[.cdw-name]Alyssa Battistoni[.cdw-name]

I have to say Moby-Dick, which is in the book and one of my all-time faves. It’s just such a great book — about capitalism and nature and formal subsumption and nature-based industries and the forms of wage that are paid out when you don’t have control over workplace