This section contains archived content made available for reference, research, or recordkeeping purposes. These materials are not actively maintained and may not meet current accessibility standards, such as WCAG 2.1 Level AA. If you need assistance accessing this content or require an accessible format, please contact sohwebmaster@uci.edu. We are committed to ensuring access for all users and will provide accommodations promptly upon request.
Critical Theory Winter 2026 Mini-Seminar:
"In the Shadow of the Commodity"
Alyssa Battistoni
Barnard College
When: January 14th-16th, 2026 from 4-6pm
Where: HG 1010
In the Shadow of the Commodity
In Capital, Marx famously declares that the commodity is capitalism’s elementary social form. Marx’s own analysis and many others since have focused on understanding the peculiar form of the commodity and the dynamics of commodification. Capitalism is, in some accounts, treated as equivalent to commodification; its scope indexed by the extension of the commodity form. This series of seminars takes up Marx’s method—the critique of political economy—to look beyond the commodity, proposing that in the commodity’s shadow we gain a new vantage point on a familiar system and its animating social relations. The first seminar will explore the “dual character” of capitalist social forms and consider how they pertain to other distinctively capitalist elements—in particular, the free gift of nature. The second seminar will interrogate the dynamics which attend these unusual forms, attending to the processes by which things are not only absorbed but abdicated or expelled by capital. The third seminar will consider the different forms that income and profit take, with particular attention to the economic and political differences between wages and rents.
Alyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. She works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in contemporary social and political thought. Alyssa is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), and Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton 2025). Her academic work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, NOMOS, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and the Socialist Register, and she writes frequently for publications including the New Left Review, n+1, Boston Review, the Nation, Dissent, and Jacobin. She is a member of the Climate & Community Institute and on the editorial board of Dissent.