This article offers a critical engagement with Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature from within the Marxist ecological tradition. Focusing on Chapter 3, “The Natural Machine,” it argues that Battistoni’s conceptual innovations—suprasumption and abdication—risk ontologizing what Marx understood as historically specific class antagonisms. Through close engagement with Battistoni’s account of nature-based production, the article demonstrates that the unevenness she attributes to the resistance of matter is better explained as the outcome of historically specific class relations. Drawing on Raju Das’s work on forms of subsumption, the article argues that transitions between formal, real, and commercial subsumption are determined not by the stubbornness of natural processes but by the balance of class forces and the mediating role of the state. The broader tendency in contemporary eco-Marxism to displace class struggle in favour of ecological dialectics, the article concludes, produces a Marxism without a subject—one in which metabolic frictions substitute for the organized agency of the working class.
T. Arnold (2026) studied this question.