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INJURY TO BUILDINGS AND VEGETABLES  
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Alyssa Battistoni
September 4, 2025
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_ 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. _

Carnagie Steel Works postcard,

 

The following is adapted from _Free Gifts: Capitalism and the
Politics of Nature_
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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. _I_n 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._

_N+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and
politics published three times a year. We also post new online-only
work each week and publish books expanding on the interests of the
magazine._

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