Alyssa Battistoni on care work, organizing, and the "free gift of nature"

"Human beings need not just human care, but a lot of other kinds of beings and life and things to survive."

Alyssa Battistoni is a political theorist at Barnard College with research interests in environmental and climate politics, Marxism, feminism, and the history of political thought. She is the co-author, with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), and writes frequently for publications including the Nation, New Left Review, Dissent, Jacobin, n+1, and Boston Review. 

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

MH: While this has changed a bit, I still see this fairly pervasive understanding of “green jobs” as being specifically energy and building stuff. But as you've written about, we should have a more expansive understanding that includes the vital work of caring for each other on the planet. Why do you think that former narrow framing is so persistent, and why is it important to take a broader view with regards to work?

AB: It's a question I've thought a lot about, and I think you're right that it has changed some, but probably not as much as we'd like. I think it's downstream of the way that we think about the climate, where climate policies are just energy policies, and we certainly have seen that in the IRA and a lot of the framing around Build Back Better even; mainstream climate policy is energy policy, basically. And so the only jobs we really see people talk about are the jobs that are threatened by winding down extractive industry, so that becomes the focus from the side of the jobs we need to phase out. Then obviously you also have the building out being mostly in the renewable energy side of things, and then some renewable energy infrastructure downstream from that. I think it is, in part, a function of this generally quite narrow focus around energy policy as being the only kind of climate policy, and then climate policy as being the only serious environmental policy that we really see in mainstream politics in the US right now.

I think part of it is also a broader association of work with waged work, with industrial work. Obviously there are forms of waged care work, but waged work and industrial work are usually what we think of. So when we think of all the other kinds of work that are necessary for human life and thriving, there's a lot of things that—as socialist feminists and Marxist feminists have pointed out for a long time—are not in that imaginary of what jobs are. I think that is, as you suggest, changing a little bit, in part because of the fact that we are in this care crisis. Care workers are overworked, underpaid, working in really hard conditions. Both a crisis on the side of people who need access to care and people who are providing that care.

So there has been a renewed attention to the question of those kinds of jobs, but it's not always put together with the climate question. And I think that's important, because as important as the energy transition is and all of the sorts of things that need to happen around that are, it's just not a solution to either the climate crisis or the broader environmental crisis to have an economic model built around a purely industrial model—you're not just going to build solar panels in perpetuity as a model of an economy. What do we need to live good, decent lives, for people to live well with relatively low resource-intensive ways? I think care work is a really important part of that, as well as other kinds of work: care for ecosystems, a lot of other kinds of non-care work that are part of living low-carbon lives. I think we have to be thinking much, much bigger than energy and that narrow framing. 

Yeah, and I think also among the left you sometimes see a view that fetishizes industrial workers as being especially important, rather than thinking in ways that you're talking about or thinking about the working class as it actually exists. How do you think this broader conception of work and what constitutes socially and environmentally important work can be better incorporated into Green New Deal or ecosocialist organizing?

It's a great question, and I think that does bring up another important piece of why we neglect some of these kinds of work from the left: the view of the industrial proletariat as the agents of history, in some cases in a fairly metaphysical sense, but in other cases strategic, like “these are the people who have the ability to go on strike, shut down the factory, shut down profits,” all of that. And a suggestion that care work is too marginal, or it's not productive in some sense. But I think that, as you point out, if you look at the working class in the US today, certainly we have a very different picture than the industrial model of the early to mid 20th century. Care work is the fastest growing field across the country. It is where we see the contemporary working class, in care work and service work, and it's a very different demographic makeup: mostly women, women of color, and more generally people of color. You are more likely to see men of color working in care work than white men, for example.

So you have this different imaginary than the mid-century steelworker or autoworker kind of vision. But that's obviously the working class that we need to be organizing, and if we want to have a working class-centered and -led movement, that is a really crucial group of people to be bringing into a Green New Deal movement. Especially when you look at the numbers. To take the classic example of the workers that you always see discussed when we talk about climate policy, you just have a very, very small number of coal miners—I think it's 40,000 or 50,000—in the US today, and you have millions of care workers. Which isn’t to say we're not organizing and thinking about how to bring those workers into the movement, but if you really want to a mass labor movement that's fighting for a Green New Deal, you need to have a way of speaking to and bringing in these really large, growing, actively organizing sectors of workers. That is some of what I see as the strategic or political argument for thinking about how to make those connections to that segment of the labor movement, that I think is sort of there. National Nurses United endorsed the Green New Deal, some of these unions representing non-industrial workers have been on the margins of some climate, Green New Deal—probably less explicitly ecosocialist—organizing, but I think there's a lot of room to build there.

Staying on organizing but switching gears a little bit, you wrote a really good article a few years ago about your grad school organizing experience. What was that like?

That was very hard [laughs]. I organized for the grad workers union when I was in grad school, and it was a UNITE HERE local. The other unions at Yale, where I went to grad school, were also UNITE HERE, so the thing that was really cool about it was that we had this model that's pretty rare where you have multiple different kinds of workers or locals representing different categories of workers at the same institution, but they're all in some kind of relationship to one another, instead of having like SEIU doing one set and UAW doing another. So there was this really unified sense of a common enemy, and we were trying to organize grad students but also trying to work with these other unions and we were working with people who were doing community organizing in New Haven.

I learned a lot from the experience about organizing in general. Certainly thinking about how you work across groups of workers that are often treated as separate or in different kinds of positions or having different positionalities, to figure out how to make those connections and to build solidarity. In this case it was clerical workers, dining hall workers, maintenance staff, grad workers, all doing really different kinds of work, but we had a shared enemy. I think that's often a big question for me: who is the shared enemy among a bunch of different workers or people, and how do you figure out those connections?

But it was also by far the hardest thing I've ever done. I think it gave me a real appreciation for just how hard it is to win these really tough political fights, build power, to strategize. In some ways, strategizing is the easy part; you're like, “Okay I have a plan, here's my vision, here's how I think we can win.” And then you have to do it, which means getting people on board to change their lives to do really challenging things, to do things that they're scared to do, to be in a position where they're risking something or feel like they are putting something on the line, and are doing that in order to achieve something that they want or to make the future a way they want it to be.

It was a really transformative experience in a way that I think is really important for politics. Because when we think about climate organizing, or building ecosocialism, it is such an incredibly daunting task most of the time. It is this thing where you have to imagine the world being radically different than it is and how you could get there. The belief that transformation is possible—self-transformation as well as transformation of the world—is really vital to that. The experience of doing that, the lessons I learned from it, are things that I feel are essential to thinking about politics in general. 

Did it change how you view your research or your writing?

Definitely. I’m a political theorist, I'm in a political science department, supposedly you are learning about politics. A lot of people have studied politics and have not really done politics, and I kind of think everyone should have to do some political project to get a PhD in political science. It made me see the whole world in a different way, in ways that are hard to even identify, just constantly thinking about questions about everything from doing power analyses to getting people to act or what assumptions people are bringing into their vision of the world. There's nothing like doing that kind of thing for making you be both visionary and concrete at the same time, and that is something I try to remember in writing.

So you're working on a book right now about the relationship between nature and capitalism. What is the free gift of nature? 

Yes, it's called Free Gifts. So “free gift of nature” is a term that you see in a lot of classical political economy, where you have people like Adam Smith and David Ricardo talking about the gifts of nature and the natural agents that contribute to production, like the wind that blows the sails of the merchant ship, the sheep that grow the wool. Agriculture is often the most obvious example where the land is doing all this work. There's also this question in a lot of classical political economy around: how do we think about these natural agents? What are they doing in economic production? And then you have Marx's critique of a lot of this discourse. Marx was arguing that we have to think about the free gifts of nature as they are within capitalism and not just as these bountiful agents in general, that they’re gifts to capital. He has a couple of lines about the free gifts of nature, but mostly leaves it at that.

But the book is basically arguing for seeing the free gift of nature as a capitalist social form—like the commodity, like wage labor, and like value—as sort of the inverse of the commodity in a way. That it's defined in relation to the condition of wage labor, in relation to the commodity; you only really talk about a free gift when you have this world defined by exchange value. And that's a way that all of these really different capacities of the natural world become this one thing, the free gift of nature, and then trying to trace that through different ways that that appears. So thinking about things like natural capital, the externality, or reproductive labor is one of the examples. Looking at these different ways that we see the free gift of nature reappearing in later political economy, especially in the 20th century, and how that helps us understand these different elements or questions that you see coming up all the time. I feel like The Financial Times runs a piece like this once a month: “Bees do $135 billion of work, how come we don't pay them for it?” There's this question I see over and over: why don't we value these really useful things? And so trying to look at that across a range of examples and kinds of questions or issues and rooting it back in the Marxist critique, which I think is under-theorized in a lot of ways. 

How does that idea relate to the attempts we see to quantify nature or internalize capitalism's externalities?

It’s often discussed in terms of putting a price on nature, and then you get this argument about whether we should do that or not. Is it morally wrong to put a price on nature? Is there always something missing? That there's something that doesn't capture—the intrinsic value of nature, but also even literally what ecosystems are doing. When you try to parse them up—carbon credits being one example, you're detaching the carbon absorption service from this broader ecosystem—it doesn't really make sense in a lot of ways. One thing that's striking to me is that there actually has been a very low valuation of natural capital, of ecosystem services. Carbon credits are probably the one minor exception, but even that, the scale is actually pretty small.

I think there's something interesting about the fact that they aren't ever valued. That goes back to this free gift problem, which is that capital doesn’t want to pay for natural capital; it's not going to unless you basically have a state that forces that. It's very, very hard to force that to happen. They're not really amenable to commodification, in a lot of ways. People constantly fear the threat of commodification, but that's not happening and that's some of the paradox of the free gift, too. We think of capitalism as commodifying everything, and my question was: why haven't all of these really useful and supposedly valuable services been commodified yet? Why do they seem to resist this commodification? That is I think one of the really paradigmatic examples of this free gift problem, this non-value problem.

How do you define social and ecological reproduction? Or how do you explain it, especially as it relates to the free gift concept? 

When I think about social and ecological reproduction, or talk about ecological reproduction in particular, I've mostly thought about it as in some ways an extension of the classic concept of social reproduction, which is just the idea of these activities which go into reproducing, on the one hand human life, but also the social order more generally, for better and for worse in ways, but that are often, though not always, unvalued or undervalued relative to industrial work. And there's obviously a ton of really great Marxist feminist work on that labor and social reproduction in general. But I was always struck by the fact that it's focused on the work of sustaining human life done by human beings; thinking of social and ecological reproduction expands that a little bit in both directions. Human beings need not just human care, but a lot of other kinds of beings and life and things to survive. The biospheric functions to keep the planet habitable for us—thus far [laughs]—are comprised of all of these other kinds of creatures/beings. It is not a human-only, social-only enterprise, the work of keeping people alive. So there is this question of how we sustain those forms of ecological reproduction or regeneration or things that are not natural resources that go into the production process, or go into industrial production as we traditionally think of it, but that are that are necessary for those things to occur, that are necessary for human life to continue. And then what are the kinds of human action or care that need to be extended towards those other kinds of beings, life, ecosystems to reproduce those systems and for those to be mutually regenerative? 

That goes back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of what kinds of work we think about as green jobs. How do we build thinking about that kind of work into our understanding of green jobs? Along with a recognition of care work, there's been more recognition of, for example, Indigenous ecosystemic care in recent years, which is really important. That is something we need to have much more present in things like climate policy or thinking about climate jobs. Like care work more generally, it suffers from the problem of being hard to make profitable; you're not going to have capital investment in ecosystem care work. There's not a lot of money to be made off of that. So it's another thing where you need public funding or people are just going to do it without wages, without support, probably without a lot of recognition. That's another reason why some of these kinds of workers are really only around the margins of our conversations, because all of our public policy stuff is so focused on just incentivizing the private sector and incentivizing capital investment, rather than public sector work doing the things that we need to do, whether or not they're going to have a good return on investment. Unfortunately, this whole other category of stuff basically is just not on the table.