BOOKS

A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos; foreword by Naomi Klein. More on the book here.

Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (in progress)

From costless carbon emissions to priceless ecosystems, the paradox of natural non-value recurs frequently in environmental politics. I explore this paradox via the concept of the “free gift of nature,” used by classical political economists to describe contributions of natural agents to economic production, building on Marx’s critique of classical political economy in theorizing the peculiar concept of the “free gift.” I theorize the “free gift” as a distinctively capitalist social form: like the more familiar commodity, the free gift has a dual character, one that captures the encounter, and disjuncture, between use and exchange value, content and form, effect and appearance, nature and society. The heart of the book traces various representations of the free gift of nature in twentieth-century political and economic thought, showing how the free gift reappears in various guises: as machinery and raw material; pollution and negative externality; reproductive labor; ecosystem service and natural capital—each associated with a distinct “site” of capitalism—the industrial factory, the environment, the household, the ecosystem. The concluding chapters explore ecologically-motivated anxieties about freedom, considering what vision of freedom can plausibly animate the left in the face of climate change and other ecological challenges. 

PAPERS

(Forthcoming) “Gender and Democracy,” in The Cambridge History of Democracy Vol. 3, 1800-present, eds. Christopher Meckstroth and Samuel Moyn, under contract with Cambridge University Press.

“State, Capital, Nature: State Theory for the Capitalocene,” in Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New Debate, eds. Rafael Khachaturian, Eva Nanopoulos, and Rob Hunter, Palgrave Macmillan 2023.

“Situated Knowledge, Committed Theory,” in “Visionary Political Theory,” Contemporary Political Theory

“A Green New Deal for Care,” in The Green New Deal and the Future of Work, eds. Craig Calhoun and Benjamin Fong, Columbia University Press, 2022, pp. 105-119.

“The End of Environmental Political Theory as We Know It,” Political Theory July 2022.

“Sustaining Life on This Planet,” in Democratize Work: The Case for Reorganizing the Economy, eds. Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana, and Dominique Méda, University of Chicago Press, 2022.  

“The Other Side of Abundance: Feminist and Ecological Arguments for Guaranteed Income,” in Universal Basic Income: Global Histories, eds. Peter Sloman, Daniel Zamora Vargas, and Pedro Ramos Pinto. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

“Anthropocene Politics,” Perspectives on Politics, 18(3), 2020.

“Bringing in the Work of Nature: From Natural Capital to Hybrid Labor.” Political Theory Vol. 45(1), 2017.

“Kata and/or Streiphen: Climate Change and the Politics of Catastrophe.” In Catastrophe: The History and Theory of an Operative Concept. Eds. Nitzan Lebovic and Andreas Killen. Boston: De Gruyter, 2014.

REVIEWS

Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador, by Thea Riofrancos, H-Diplo Roundtable Forum, 2021.

How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet, eds. Alex Blanchette and Sarah Belsky, Economic Geography, 96(5), pp. 502–503.

In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, by Katrina Forrester, H-Diplo Roundtable Forum, October 2019.

“Disrupting the future.” Review of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, by Aaron Bastani, Nature Sustainability 2, (651) 2019.

Connected by Commitment: Oppression and Our Obligation to Undermine It, by Mara Marin, Contemporary Political Theory, 18, 2019, pp. 175-176.