Injury to Buildings and Vegetables
The following is adapted from Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, out now from Princeton University Press.
After Milton Friedman published a 1975 compilation of writings titled There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, the phrase (lifted from Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel about a lunar penal colony) became something of a libertarian shibboleth. For Friedman, the “free lunch myth” was epitomized by the ostensibly “free” goods and services provided by the welfare state, which in his view were paid for by the unjustified taxation of others’ wealth. But the phrase “no such thing as a free lunch” was invoked in a radically different manner by Friedman’s contemporary, the left-wing ecologist Barry Commoner, who in 1971 identified it as one of the four central principles of ecology. For Commoner, the phrase neatly encapsulated the conservation principle of physics—that energy can never be created nor destroyed—in combination with the ecological tenet that everything is connected. It meant, in Commoner’s reading, that anything human beings took from the planetary ecosystem would eventually have to be returned to it.
The free lunch, in Commoner’s view, was the explosion of wealth in the postwar period, while the hidden “costs” were metaphorical, paid not in dollars but in material terms: polluted air, deteriorating ecosystems, diminished health. Commoner’s analysis implies a corollary: there is no such thing as a free gift. Like the free lunch, the free gift of nature is an illusion. Its costs always appear elsewhere in the system. The question is not whether they are paid, but what form they take and who—or what—pays them.
Pollution has often been described as the “price of progress,” with the implication that it is worth paying. Those who have actually paid the costs have often disagreed. Since the advent of the industrial era, the noise, smoke, soot, dust, and other effluents generated by production have frequently generated complaints, concern, and outright conflict. It is striking, then, that pollution is largely absent from Marx’s work—particularly given that he wrote Capital in the midst of London’s legendary coal-smoke fogs, which his contemporaries Charles Dickens and Herman Melville felt compelled to describe. Instead it would be Marx’s lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels who described in agonizing detail the burden of pollution, waste, and disease borne by the working class in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
In Manchester and surrounding factory towns, Engels observed, the “pall of smoke” hung in the air and coated buildings, while tannery buildings, dye works, bone mills, and gas works discharged “filth, both liquid and solid” into the River Irk and “belch forth black smoke from their chimneys.” Workers suffered from typhus and cholera, struggled to breathe properly, and died much younger than they ought. Those living in the poorest parts of town were twice as likely to die as those in wealthy ones. In Engels’s view, this constituted “social murder”: “If society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably come to premature and unnatural ends,” he argued, “their death is as violent as if they had been stabbed or shot.” The problem, however, was that this kind of violence was rarely recognized as such. “Everyone is responsible and yet no one is responsible,” Engels wrote, “because it appears as if the victim has died from natural causes.” For Engels, the “disguised, malicious” nature of social murder required all the more vigilance in identifying its culprit—and the vehemence with which he condemned it was a way of bringing it to light.
Engels wrote as pollution was being politicized in industrial and urban settings, a century before it became a truly mass political issue. But the political challenges that he identified have only grown starker. The effects of pollution are today even more maldistributed than in Engels’s time, and now manifest on a global scale. Its harms, too, are perhaps more disguised than ever. While the filth and smoke that choked Manchester were tangible to all, many other kinds of harmful matter, like the chemicals in pesticides, go unseen; some, like carbon dioxide, are imperceptible to human senses altogether. Efforts to politicize these conditions have tended to constitute variations on Engels’s theme, calling attention to both the violence they do and to the disparity of their effects.
Politically, pollution is perhaps most widely understood as a problem of justice in the distribution of harms. For decades, environmental justice activists have drawn attention to the disproportionate siting of landfills, incinerators, chemical plants, and other deleterious facilities in working-class communities and communities of color. Within political theory, too, environmental “bads” have overwhelmingly been considered through the lens of distributive justice, considered in terms of racial and global disparities, as well as in terms of the temporal distribution of risks and harms across present and future generations.
Critiques of unequal burdens are often paired with efforts to expose the severity of their effects, often through rhetorical means, as in Rob Nixon’s influential characterization of pollution as a form of “slow violence.” Efforts to hold specific perpetrators accountable have frequently drawn on language reminiscent of that of social murder: the United Farm Workers described pesticides as “poison” in the fields; the union leader Tony Mazzocchi, of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, charged that “murder was being committed in the workplace”; Jean-Paul Sartre charged French mine operators with “homicide” of workers who developed silicosis. Moral philosophers, meanwhile, have leveled charges of complicity at the level of the individual, seeking to allocate responsibility for the harms associated with personal consumption.
These diagnoses do essential work to disclose the politics lurking within seemingly amorphous miasmas, and to expose their troubling effects. There are indisputably stark disparities in the distribution of environmental harms, which are quite plausibly understood in terms of violence: pollution really does attack people’s bodily integrity, undermine their physical function, cause injury and even early death. Yet while critiques of the unequal and unjust distribution of pollution rightly identify its harmful effects, they often stop short of adequately tracing its causes.
The charge of social murder is galvanizing and illuminating in crucial respects. And yet, contra Engels, it is different to be killed by air pollution, or by a hurricane intensified by climate change, than to be stabbed or shot—which isn’t to say that it is not as bad. The difference, moreover, isn’t located only in the geographically and temporally diffuse character of slow violence, though these too are important. It is also rooted in the ways that these harms are produced: not by individual actors intentionally inflicting injuries onto others, but as an accidental effect of actions undertaken for different purposes altogether. The problem frequently named as social murder or slow violence is, in other words, a particularly visceral form of the unintended consequences generated by class and market rule. Critics of complicity are right that we are all implicated in these harms to some degree. Yet this is largely because so many of our decisions are mediated by markets in ways that constitutively exclude social costs and divorce our actions from their effects. Although consumption is the most common culprit for pollution, moreover, its more significant origin is elsewhere: in production.
Indeed, pollution largely emerges from exactly the same production process as the commodity: the same process that generates a car, for instance, also generates smoke, ash, carbon dioxide, and other material byproducts. Unlike the commodity, however, this byproduct has no exchange value—and unlike the free gift of nature, it has no (positive) use value either. Pollution, then, is an odder phenomenon than is often recognized. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, pollution cannot be understood in strictly material terms—as smoke, or dirt, or even excrement—but only as “the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter.” Pollution is “matter out of place”: matter that is not where it is supposed to be. In Douglas’s view, social classifications of matter typically reflect a divide between the sacred and the profane. But this distinction can’t hold in capitalism, which after all is notorious for profaning the sacred. In a system where matter is ordered by prices, pollution is matter without a price. It is surplus matter—not in an absolute sense, but matter in excess of what can be bought and sold. Pollution is the underside of the free gift’s spontaneous and seemingly limitless bounty: the laboriously manufactured detritus that no one has agreed to buy, and no one wants. Pollution is, in the words of the economist J. H. Dales, something that “no one will either pay for or accept as a gift.”
In mainstream economics, this phenomenon is described in terms of the externality. Externalities occur when economic activity causes costs for third parties that are not reflected in the costs to the producer, such that they are not taken into account in economic decisions—and, as such, can represent pollution in economic terms. First conceptualized in 1920 to describe minor flaws in the market like the unpriced “external effects” of smoky chimneys on laundry, by the early 21st century, the externality would be described as the cause of a phenomenon that threatens to end human civilization as we know it. In retrospect, then, the externality is plausibly the most significant economic concept of the 20th century.
The history of the externality is, at its heart, one of economists encountering the environment. Although neither of its two central theorists was an environmental economist, the examples they used to illustrate the problem are teeming with nature: air darkened by a smoky chimney or purified by a leafy park, a field overrun with rabbits, cattle that stray from a rancher’s field into a farmer’s, a train whose sparking engine causes nearby woods to catch fire, a polluted stream with sickly fish, a building blocking the wind that powers a windmill. While externalities are not limited to “environmental” cases, they are fundamentally concerned with the unintended consequences of action in a material world—and so mark an iteration of long-standing debates about the relationship between intention and outcome, private and social interest, individual and collective action.
The British welfare economist Arthur C. Pigou was the first to identify the externality as a discrete concept. Writing, like Marx, from the vantage point of England’s early and tumultuous industrialization, Pigou noted the problem that Marx had only glancingly acknowledged: that the production of commodities was often accompanied by unintentional and sometimes severe physical side effects.
Money, welfare economists acknowledged, was not the only thing that mattered in life, nor even in economics—yet as the influential English marginalist Alfred Marshall observed, it was “the one convenient means of measuring human motive on a large scale.” Following Marshall, Pigou argued that assessments of economic welfare had to use “the measuring rod of money,” even if some things were beyond its scope. Yet he also acknowledged that this method sometimes produced “violent paradoxes” wherein welfare and price diverged. These paradoxes, stemming from disparities in use and exchange value, were often related to, though not always identical with, instances where the public welfare diverged from the interests of private investors. Pigou described such instances, where prices failed to reflect the effects of production on society at large, as “external economies.”
The valence of the “external economy” was not always negative. Sometimes private producers accidentally generate unpriced social benefits, as when people built private parks that improved the neighborhood air. Pigou’s central example, however—destined to become the textbook case of the externality—was a negative one: a factory with a smoky chimney. Pigou cited the astonishing observation that in London, “owing to the smoke, there is only 12 percent as much sunlight as is astronomically possible.” That smoke imposed literal costs on the community at large—“in injury to buildings and vegetables, expenses for washing clothes and cleaning rooms, expenses for the provision of extra artificial light, and in many other ways”—which were not reflected in the costs to the factory owner. In such cases, Pigou argued, the pursuit of private wealth tended to diminish public welfare rather than increase it. Externalities suggested, in other words, that private vices did not always produce public benefits. In some instances, it seemed that a market transaction could make those who were not party to it worse rather than better off. Fortunately, externalities seemed to be relatively rare and easily rectified. Pigou argued that where the market failed to secure social benefits, the state was justified in intervening. Although the precise cost of external effects was often difficult to assess, they could be estimated and included in the price of relevant goods through a tax or similar pricing mechanism.
For the next several decades most economists followed Pigou’s view of externalities as an instance of “market failure” in which markets failed to optimally allocate resources, albeit a negligible one that could be solved with minor adjustments. Externalities appeared, in the words of one mid-century welfare economist, to be “exceptional and unimportant.” As postwar economic growth and material throughput skyrocketed, however, pollution problems emerged or accelerated across the industrialized world. Externalities suddenly began to appear ubiquitous and significant. A concomitant economic literature exploded, and so too did public concern about the harmful effects of industrial production. It was through pollution that the environment became visible, quite literally: smog made air newly perceptible; oil spills gave water an unnatural sheen. The mainstream environmental movement developed in large part in response to this novel political object.
As pollution grew more politically significant, the prospect that externalities constituted a potentially systematic market failure began to seriously concern champions of free markets. For many liberal thinkers, the market offers a way to coordinate action through freely undertaken exchange rather than direct coercion or violence. The idea that unintended consequences might be perverse—or even, in Pigou’s terms, violent—fundamentally challenged this optimistic view. Pigou’s account of disparities between private and public well-being seemed to cast a smoggy pall over the happy Mandevillian marriage of the individual and common good. If externalities were truly ubiquitous, moreover, they threatened to license a drastic extension of government and severe restrictions on market freedom. The externality, Milton Friedman worried, could be “used to justify a completely unlimited extension of government.”
The externality was thus a problem that had to be solved. In 1960, the British economist Ronald Coase launched a major critique of Pigou in his landmark article “The Problem of Social Cost.” Coase argued that Pigou had stated that certain private activities caused public injury as a matter of fact: that when a factory’s “smoky chimney” affected the surrounding air, for example, it constituted a clear case of social harm caused by the factory, which should be rectified by government intervention to limit the smoke. But Pigou’s utilitarianism, he argued, had led him to import a moral framework that informed his assessment of both the necessity and ends of state intervention. Pigou had imbued the positive science of economics with normative evaluation.
Coase made three key moves in response. First, he argued that economic activities are not unidirectional but “reciprocal”: their effects always go in two directions. The smoke from the factory chimney, for example, would have harmful effects on health only if people chose to live nearby: thus “both parties cause the damage.” Conversely, to limit smoke, as Pigou proposed, would impose a cost on the factory owner in the form of reduced production. Why, Coase asked, should the factory have to accept the costs of reducing smoke for the benefit of the neighborhood? Why instead should nearby residents not pay the factory to reduce the smoke, or move away from the area altogether? Economists could not answer these questions, Coase argued, without imposing moral judgments inappropriate to a technical field. They could speak only to whether the value of clean air, assessed in economic terms, was greater or less than the value of the product that had generated the smoke. Second, Coase argued that in highlighting the disparity between public welfare and private profit, Pigou had identified the wrong problem altogether. Only the “total social product,” computed by weighing the gains of preventing a given activity compared with those of allowing it to continue, was relevant. The goal was not to eliminate smoke altogether: to allow any claim to harm to prevent a smoky factory from operating might make everyone worse off. Rather, the goal was to “secure the optimum amount of smoke pollution,” defined as the “amount that will maximize the value of production.”
Finally, the mere fact that some externalities were uncompensated was not in itself a sufficient argument for state intervention. State action, whether in the form of taxes or regulation, came with “transaction costs” of its own, which might be more significant than those of either doing nothing at all or leaving the interested parties to work it out for themselves. In instances where state action was warranted, moreover, the blunt tools of taxation and regulation were not the only options. Instead, Coase argued that “the right to do something which has a harmful effect (such as the creation of smoke, noise, smells, etc.) is also a factor of production”: the state should assign rights to these activities, as it did to other factors of production, and allow private individuals to work out the value of smokeless air for themselves. Rights, in other words, could be allocated by markets, just like any other good. If a producer wanted to generate smoke, they could simply pay the person harmed for the privilege, or vice versa.
Coase’s ideas were rapidly embraced as a counter to the frame of market failure. Treating the right to pollute as a commodity, proponents argued, would allow people to make choices that more accurately reflect how much they valued clean air or quiet. “The Problem of Social Cost” became a pillar of the neoliberal law and economics movement, and is today one of the most cited pieces of legal scholarship of all time. It has, in turn, been condemned as a form of economic imperialism that indiscriminately applies market logics to things that should not be bought and sold—a category which, in the eyes of many critics, includes pollution.
Yet Coase’s analysis of the externality is perceptive in key respects. He is right that Pigou’s analysis relies on an unspoken moral framework—to know that the market has failed to achieve optimal welfare, one must know what the optimal welfare is; to correct prices, a benevolent administrator (or moral philosopher) must know what they ought to be. Coase is right, too, that “social costs” are reciprocal and antagonistic—that one person’s harm is often another’s benefit. And he is right to argue that harms like pollution are, effectively, factors of production, insofar as the transformation of some materials into new forms inevitably produces surplus matter. He is right, in other words, that Pigou and his followers take the meaning of social cost for granted and arbitrarily apply a normative standard to pollution that they typically do not apply to other kinds of economic goods. But the distinction between pollution and other kinds of goods just doesn’t hold.
In other words, pollution and social costs are part of the “cost of doing business,” and should be seen as of a piece with wages and rents—which is to say, understood as expressions of capitalism’s core dynamics, and as sites of political struggle. But the struggle over the burden of social costs is better characterized in terms of struggle between classes with disparate power than as a market exchange between equal individuals. Class power grants the ability to decide not only which commodities to intentionally produce, but also which byproducts to generate in the course of rearranging raw materials and labor processes into new form. It is not only the power to command the labor of others within a given production process, but the power to impose costs on those who stand outside the production process altogether.
Capital’s control over production, then, is also control over byproduction—control over what is produced unintentionally, which is not to say unknowingly. It is all too easy for capital to abdicate responsibility for the effects of byproduction: expelling surplus matter, by default, is costless. If surplus matter has no buyers, however, it nevertheless has consumers: as Commoner’s “second ecological law” asserts, “Everything must go somewhere.” Waste does not simply disappear because it is not valued economically. The ability to impose pollution on others is another aspect of class rule—and the inability to refuse it is a form of unfreedom in its own right. The harms named as pollution or “slow violence,” then, should be read as the unintentional but no less systematic consequence of a particular organization of social relations expressed in and through the material world, one that consistently compels us to treat ecological effects as costless.
Mediated through matter, these social relations take on a life of their own. Surplus matter circulates differently than commodities; it accumulates in inverse patterns to wealth. Although it often originates at the point of production, it rarely stays there: once released into the world, it tends to travel, such that its effects may materialize far from the original site of generation. Temporally, too, physical effects of pollution often appear at a distance from their causes, such that industrial diseases tend to emerge in postindustrial times, long after factories close and jobs disappear. In natura costs materialize in the form of smoky skies and brilliant sunsets, dead zones and silent springs. They appear in black lung disease among coal miners and heightened cancer rates among farmworkers, in children’s asthma rates and differences in life-span; in Manchester’s “pale, lank, narrow-chested, hollow-eyed ghosts . . . weak, flabby, and lacking in all energy.”
Indeed, from an ecological perspective, the scope of the externality seems almost infinite—precisely as Friedman had feared. The neoclassical assumption that an economic transaction can be contained to the parties to a contract appears delusional in a world where everything affects everything else. What is really astonishing, from this vantage point, is the idea that the revolutions in the use of nature heralded by modernity’s admirers could take place without any corresponding transformations of the broader natural world—the idea, for instance, that billions of tons of organic matter, representing millions of years of concentrated life, could be extracted from the depths of the Earth and burned in a span of decades without any effect on the presently living planet.
While the social costs—understood as costs to people—of untrammeled pollution are colossal, the ecological costs, those borne by nonhuman entities, are almost too vast to grasp. The sheer amount of surplus matter unleashed on the world in the past two centuries has transformed the ways that many kinds of creatures live in it. Some of this matter is synthetic and novel—like the microplastics that now permeate even the deep reaches of the ocean, and which do not decompose. But surplus matter has also altered energy flows and cellular structure, the molecular composition of air and chemical composition of water, such that ostensibly organic materials take on new dimensions. Algae grow naturally in many bodies of water, for instance—but algal blooms, turbocharged by fertilizer intended for crops, can suffocate aquatic fauna dependent on oxygenated water. Microbes long present in animal respiratory systems can, under abnormal weather conditions, multiply so drastically as to become deadly en masse. The effects of surplus matter on nonhumans are much stranger—and often more ominous—than we tend to imagine. They unsettle the question of what pollution is. If, as Douglas claims, pollution is always defined in relation to particular organizations of social life, then defining pollution in relation to various forms of ecological life opens up a dizzying array of possible answers. A bright white streetlight can be pollution to a bat that hunts in the dark. The rumble of a passing freighter can be pollution to a whale that communicates through song.
If the monetary costs to human beings of surplus matter are often difficult to estimate and always imbued by social inequalities, the “costs” to nonhuman life are literally incalculable, at least in monetary terms. They appear only in natura, almost never in a form that capital can see. Just as the human economy imports “free goods” from the natural economy, the ecological economist Herman Daly argues, it also exports “bads” without having to pay for their absorption. Insects can’t demand compensation for the decimation of their numbers by pesticides; fish can’t insist on payment for the decimation of their waters by fertilizer runoff. If it is always logical for capital to impose social costs on the poor, as the economist Joan Martínez-Alier observes, it is more logical still to impose them on the natural world.
Excerpted from FREE GIFTS: CAPITALISM AND THE POLITICS OF NATURE. Copyright 2025 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Alyssa Battistoni is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and an Editor at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, n+1, the Nation, Jacobin, In These Times, Dissent, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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