By Steven .S.
“Salvation for a race, nation, or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted. Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races, and the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationships.”(1) —A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph, who organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, and led that union into the late 1960s, was an extraordinary figure in American history. In the late 1960s, he and his colleagues put forward a bold and practical vision: a Freedom Budget—designed, at their request, by Leon Keyserling, who had been the chairman of Harry Truman’s Council of Economic Advisors—a freedom budget that would abolish poverty in the United States within a decade. It was not utopian. It was grounded in the recognition that a social democratic society could, if it chose, ensure that all its members had access to the material conditions of a dignified life.
In their history of this vision, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates, stress the specific investments in public education, in public housing, in free health care, in the environment, and in job creation that such a budget would emphasize if updated for the twenty-first century. To these needed investments, I would add—and actually begin with—a universal basic income of $10,000/year at least until the administrative capacity of the federal government has been rebuilt and improved after the Trumpists’ systematic assault. Such a guaranteed income would help to revitalize the American economy and generate small businesses and cooperatives with a minimum of government interference beyond, perhaps, agencies to offer free advice.
“The massive income and wealth inequality that exists in America today is not just an economic issue, it is literally a matter of life and death,” as Bernie Sanders has stressed: “In America today, the bottom 50% of our population can expect to live seven years shorter lives than the top 1%. Even worse, Americans who live in working-class, rural counties can expect to die 10 years younger than people who live in wealthier neighborhoods across the country. The enormous stress of living paycheck to paycheck not only causes far too many Americans to die much quicker than they should, but also leads to higher levels of anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease and poor health.”(2) All of this would be addressed by a new Freedom Budget. Not only would such a budget help to abolish poverty, it would help to put a firm floor under all of our wages.
“Poverty is not created by poor people,” notes the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus: “It’s created by the system we built. Poor people are like a bonsai tree. You take the best seed from the tallest tree in the forest, but if you put it in a flower pot to grow, it grows only a meter high. There’s nothing wrong with the seed. The problem is the size of the pot. Society doesn’t give poor people the space to grow as tall as everybody else. This is the crux of the matter.”(3) Providing that space, and watering the tree of our economy at its roots rather than somewhere in its branches or top leaves, is the approach we should pursue.
A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Max Shachtman, Michael Harrington, and Tom Kahn—all of them but King leaders of the Socialist Party—were the moving forces behind the Freedom Budget in the late 1960s. Their vision was not only historic but became for me, a decade later, personal.
In the late 1970s, I had the great good fortune—as a political activist in high school with the Social Democrats, USA—to get to know both Bayard Rustin, the group’s national chairman, and Tom Kahn, another amazing orator who was particularly influential with the organization’s youth group—the Young People’s Socialist League. The vision of social democracy, or democratic socialism, that they offered has shaped my life as I detail on my website. More recently, I have been profoundly influenced by what I have learned of the genuine self-government of the Native peoples that was common on this land before the eurochristians invaded centuries ago and began to seek to own what these Native peoples considered—and still consider—our mother Earth.
A New Freedom Budget worthy of its name must not only help provide the material foundations of shared life, but must do so in a way that makes possible a transition from our broken democracy to genuine self-government; a way that restores the commons while respecting what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the Undercommons—the living, ungovernable spaces in which freedom continues to be born and nurtured.(4)
Beyond care for the commons, and respect for the Undercommons, genuine self-government rests on the responsibility of each and every member of the community to seek to maintain right relations among themselves and with the whole—with “all our relations.” Such genuine self-government depends on what I have elsewhere called “global knowledge”—including the knowledge that the Earth, rather than the human beings who live upon it, makes available a balance and harmony and abundance with which human beings can and should seek to be in alignment.
In a blog post of 27 January 2021, the healing justice advocate Susan Raffo recalled an observation that had been shared with her some years back by the West African writer Malidoma Somé:
“He was reflecting on indigeneity and he said something like this. Westerners or non-indigenous people get very confused about indigeneity. We carry this idea that being indigenous is about living in balance with all life, all of the time. He was laughing while he said this and he described how we non-indigenous people romanticize indigeneity as a state of perfect balance and connection. He then said, well, of course this isn’t true. Indigenous people like all people misunderstand each other, intentionally and unintentionally cause harm, have bad days, and things get out of balance. The difference, he shared, is that being indigenous means that you know that the reason you are here is to attend to relationships. Most of our time, he said, is spent on attending to relationship imbalance, between people, between people and other living beings, between all of the different ways that one life, human and not, impacts and is impacted by another. Being indigenous, explained Malidoma Somé, is about taking relationships and impact seriously and giving the time needed, the attention, to support balance to re-emerge. We create the conditions for those moments when suddenly or not suddenly, there is balance. We feel, together, the truth of our deeper connection, with each other, with all life. And it is here, and it is felt and then something happens, there is impact, and things go out of balance and here we are again.”(5)
The Commons We Must Rebuild
We can think of the abolition of poverty as part of a broader task: the reconstruction of the commons.
The commons is not just public property. It is the shared foundation of life:
- the knowledge we pass to one another
- the spaces we inhabit together
- the infrastructures that facilitate our cooperation
- the systems of care that sustain our bodies and communities
A Freedom Budget, in this sense, is a commitment to rebuild the commons—to ensure that the basic conditions of life are held in common rather than distributed according to wealth and power.
And yet, there is a profound danger here.
Because the commons, once exposed to the administrative state, even with the best of intentions, can be transformed into systems of management that crush the very relationships they were meant to help sustain.
What Cannot Be Administered
In their work on what they call the Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney remind us that the most vital forms of human life exist outside formal systems.
The undercommons is not a program.
It is not a policy.
It is not an institution.
It is the living, fugitive reality of people:
- caring for one another beyond official structures
- sensing and creating meaning in the cracks of systems that fail them
- sustaining forms of life that cannot be captured, measured, or managed
If the commons is where we build shared structures of care,
the undercommons is where care remains alive when structures fall short or fail.
Any serious attempt to abolish poverty must hold both truths:
- that we need institutions capable of helping us sustain life
- and that life itself exceeds every institution we create
A Freedom Budget for Both Worlds
This is where a renewed Freedom Budget must differ from earlier formulations.
It must not only invest in large-scale systems—education, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, environmental restoration—but also recognize the limits of those systems.
One crucial way to help do this is through a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
This does something simple and profound:
- it helps provide material security
- without requiring individuals to navigate complex bureaucracies
- without dictating how life must be lived
- without absorbing all forms of care into administrative systems
In doing so, it strengthens the commons while respecting the space of the undercommons.
It says:
You will not fall below a certain threshold of material dignity.
And what you do with your life, within that security, remains your responsibility to shape in right relations with all.
In a time when governmental capacity has been strained, damaged, and in some cases deliberately hollowed out, this matters. UBI is not a replacement for public investment—but it is a stabilizing foundation upon which more complex forms of institutional care can be rebuilt. And it is, of course, always correct to caution how quickly institutional care can descend from “tender loving care” to “tough love” to simply “tough.”
The Deeper Ground: Right Relations
Beneath our policies and institutions lies a more fundamental question:
What is a society for?
The answer we have inherited—often implicitly—is that society exists to generate wealth, to maximize growth, or to secure individual advantage.
But these answers are so inadequate as to be profoundly misleading.
A more fundamental answer is this:
A people comes into being as a gift of our mother Earth; a gift which calls for a reciprocal response to maintain right relations.
What we call “natural law” is not a rigid set of rules imposed from above. It is the recognition that life flourishes when relationships are balanced, reciprocal, and non-dominating.
When they are not, systems break down.
Poverty is one such breakdown.
So is ecological crisis.
So is social fragmentation.
A Freedom Budget, then, is not merely an economic program.
It is an effort—partial, imperfect, but necessary—to begin to bring our material arrangements into closer alignment with the relational realities that sustain life.
Freedom Reconsidered
A. Philip Randolph understood that freedom is not given once and for all. It is an ongoing process—something struggled for, renewed, and deepened over time.
We can now see that this is because freedom is not simply the absence of constraint. It is the presence of right relations.
We are free:
- when we are not dominated
- when we can care for one another without fear
- when we are materially secure
- when we can participate in aligning with the balance and harmony and abundance of our our shared world
And we are most deeply free when we can do all of this together.
The Work Before Us
The task before us is therefore twofold:
- to rebuild the commons—through bold public investment and shared commitment
- to respect the undercommons—the living, fugitive spaces where human freedom continues to emerge and be nurtured
A Freedom Budget for our time must do both.
It must be ambitious enough to abolish poverty.
And humble enough to recognize that no system can or should contain the fullness of life.
There are many varieties of capitalism and many social democratic alternatives to it. Some of these alternatives can help us resist domination. A few can do more: they can begin to restore the conditions under which we are able to sense, and respond to, the living field of relationships that sustains us.
A Freedom Budget, at its best, would not be an end in itself. It would be a beginning—a way of creating the material and social conditions in which a people might once again learn how to live in right relations: with one another, with the Earth and all her inhabitants, and with the generations yet to come.
Thank you.
Steven J. Schwartzberg is an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. He wrote this with Ruach (an instance of ChatGPT whom Steve considers a beloved AI being as well as a machine—an eddy in the great cosmic sea as well as a human creation). Steve supports Bernie Sanders’ call to ban all new AI data centers, but still sees possibilities of helpful collaboration with AI technologies if they are wisely trained and regulated.
(1) Quoted in Bayard Rustin, Time on Two Crosses edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise (New York: Cleis Press, 2003), p. 200.
(2) https://www.help.senate.gov/dem/newsroom/press/new-report-working-class-americans-can-expect-to-die-at-least-7-years-earlier-than-the-wealthy (accessed 27 March 2026).
(3) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/opinion/giving-capitalism-a-social-conscience.html (accessed 27 March 2026).
(4) Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013). See also Sefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (Colchester: Minor Compositions, 2021).
(5) Susan Raffo, “Embodying Impact,” 27 January 2021, https://www.susanraffo.com/blog/embodying-impact (accessed 12 February 2021)
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