Liberty Requires Infrastructure
A Case for Enlightenment Socialism
Brandon King recently ended his campaign for the Minnesota House. But he came to our attention for proposing his distinctly technoprogressive “The Space and Time Agenda,” which he is still lobbying for. Brandon proposes 3D-printed sovereign homes, a 16-hour workweek by 2040, and an Apollo-scale public asteroid mining program that would generate the resources to establish a UN Space Commons, fund a New New Deal, and a Third Reconstruction. Listen to Bread and Robots’ interview with Brandon.
I use the term “Enlightenment Socialism” because I still believe in the Enlightenment’s core promise. Ordinary people are equal in dignity. That government exists to secure rights people already possess. That law should stand above rulers. That power should answer to the people, and a free society should be built for human flourishing.
But those principles cannot actually meaningfully exist unless Liberty becomes lived material reality. It has to show up as housing, energy, food, healthcare, education, transit, time, and legal structures that ordinary people can actually feel in their daily lives. A person with formal rights but no shelter, no medicine, and no time to raise their children is free only on paper.
Enlightenment Socialism is my attempt to complete the Enlightenment under twenty-first-century material conditions. The basic claim is simple. Freedom requires infrastructure.
By infrastructure, I mean the material systems that make self-government real, built through public authority and designed so that dependence on centralized authority withers over time. In one sentence, Enlightenment Socialism is small-government socialism built to end itself.
The roots of this idea are deeply American. Thomas Paine argued in Agrarian Justice that land, because no individual created it, carried a debt to the whole community once it became private property. Exclusive ownership of nature required compensation for everyone. Paine wanted that compensation to fund endowments for the young and security for the old. He called it justice.
I have always taken Paine’s argument seriously. Whenever the law turns part of our common heritage into private property, the public is owed a dividend. In Paine’s time, the obvious common heritage was land. In our century, the resource base is larger. It includes land, air, water, the biosphere, and the mineral wealth of near-Earth space. Asteroids contain water, common metals, rare earth metals, and platinum group metals that could change the economics of scarcity. If private firms are already planning to exploit that wealth, a republic can get there first and do it for everyone.
A national asteroid-mining program, run as a public utility, would be the twenty-first-century version of Paine’s ground rent. The common heritage of all humanity benefits the people.
The old tax structure leans too heavily on labor. I want the long-term revenue base of a free society to move away from wages and toward rents on common wealth, especially wealth nobody personally created. The point is to let people keep more of their time while still funding the infrastructure that freedom requires.
When I say socialism, I mean something simple. Liberty is not real when survival depends on employers, landlords, banks, insurers, or monopolies deciding whether you get to live with any security. A republic of equals cannot rest on that kind of dependence forever.
The state still matters, but it should be treated as a means, not an end. It should build systems that reduce people’s dependence on coercive institutions. As those systems become stronger, more local, and more self-governing, the role of the state should shrink accordingly.
I call those systems Liberation Infrastructure. Liberation Infrastructure is the material base of freedom. By that, I mean a self-sufficient, decentralized, interconnected infrastructure built to meet human needs without forcing people to rely on employers, landlords, banks, or other gatekeepers to survive. Homes as a right. Community-scale microgrid energy systems. Local food production. Public transit. Open-source knowledge systems. Publicly owned, local automated fabrication. Healthcare systems that do not depend on profit extraction. Over time, as technology improves, more of that infrastructure should also become increasingly self-repairing and easier for ordinary people to govern directly. These are not just public services. They are the systems that remove the conditions that make people controllable in the first place.
Police become less necessary as poverty and desperation recede. Welfare bureaucracies shrink when households have a guaranteed floor. Regulatory burdens ease when economic life is built on transparency and cooperation rather than speculation and rent-seeking. The state withers when infrastructure replaces the coercive functions that made the state historically necessary in the first place.
That also changes how I understand political transition. I do not think entrenched class power gives way once better institutions are available. People and firms that profit from dependence will resist any serious effort to dismantle it. That means there has to be a period in which public power is used consciously, openly, and under democratic constraint to break the material basis of class rule and build a different social order in its place.
That is the original Weydemeyerian sense in which I understand the old phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat.” I mean transitional public power exercised in the interest of ordinary people against entrenched class domination. In that older sense, it belongs to a broader Enlightenment and republican question about who governs, on whose behalf, and through what institutions. And this is where I part company with the twentieth century; it does not have to mean a permanent party-state, a secret police apparatus, or a centralized command structure standing above society. Those were later historical forms, and disastrous ones.
I am not interested in a centralized dictatorship of a vanguard party. I am interested in a decentralized dictatorship of infrastructure. By that I mean a transition in which working people exercise power by building and governing the systems that make ruling classes less necessary and eventually obsolete. Housing, energy, food, healthcare, fabrication, and public coordination have to be taken out of extraction and reorganized on democratic terms. If that work is done properly, class power begins to lose the material choke points it depends on.
This is also why anarchism matters here. If liberation is real, the long-term direction is toward less rule, less hierarchy, and more direct self-government. Even Marx did not really disagree about the end point. The real question has always been the transition. The transition should start building that outcome from the beginning. If the goal is a decentralized, self-governing society, then the institutions created in the meantime should already be teaching people how to live that way. The mistake of the twentieth century was building centralized systems in the name of liberation and then pretending they would somehow dissolve into freedom later. They usually did not. The working class rules in a way that actually points beyond rule when it builds and governs the material systems that make ruling classes obsolete.
That also means public power is still necessary for the time being. Housing, energy, food, and essential production are not going to be taken out of extraction by asking nicely. There has to be a period during which public authority can block those who profit from dependence. But that authority has to remain under public control at all times. If the tools of liberation cannot be audited, recalled, or dismantled by the people, then the bridge has already begun to turn into a wall.
The twenty-first century makes the issue impossible to dodge because technology is already eroding the material basis of scarcity. Rifkin called it the zero-marginal-cost society. Fuller described the same long trend as ephemeralization: doing more and more with less and less until, eventually, you are doing everything with nothing. Renewable energy, automation, digital replication, biotechnology, and advanced fabrication all push in the same direction. The cost of producing and distributing many necessities can fall dramatically.
Capitalism cannot let that process run to its conclusion. When real scarcity starts to weaken, ownership systems manufacture artificial scarcity. Instead of letting lower costs and wider access reduce dependence, private power rebuilds dependence in new forms. Ownership gives way to subscriptions. Knowledge gets fenced behind paywalls. Housing remains trapped in landlordism and speculatively inflated land values.
Technologies that could make life easier and more secure keep getting routed through patents, platforms, subscriptions, and private toll booths. The result is the same even when the mechanism changes. The gains are real, but ordinary people do not get to live freely from them. The central conflict of our time is whether technology reduces coercion or increases dependence. Automation can free people from toil or throw them into further precarity.
Enlightenment Socialism treats every gain in productive power as a political obligation. If technology lowers the real cost of survival, society has to turn that gain into freedom. Wherever abundance becomes technically possible, access should begin to take the place of price.
That raises a practical question of political form. If freedom requires infrastructure, who builds it, who governs it, and at what scale? My answer is why I call myself a small-government socialist. I do not want a distant center trying to manage every part of life. I want authority to sit at the smallest level that can actually do the job. If something really does require national coordination, such as space infrastructure or a universal basic income, it should be handled at the national level openly and constitutionally.
The general rule is simple. Keep responsibility as close as possible to the people who live with the consequences. Power should not be allowed to coagulate where it is not needed.
All of this also bears on how liberty itself has to be understood. A free society cannot defend liberty only in one register. America has always been strong on the language of negative liberty, freedom from interference. No one is kicking in your door. No one is censoring your speech. No ruler stands above the law. Those liberties are essential. Lose them, and you get tyranny.
But liberty also has a material side. People need the real capacity to act. A person who cannot refuse a bad job because they will lose housing is not fully free. A person who cannot get medical care is not fully free. A person crushed by debt before adulthood is not fully free. Enlightenment Socialism does not set negative liberty aside in the name of positive liberty. It tries to build a material floor that lets the classic liberties survive contact with ordinary life.
Freedom should not be a temporary privilege granted by hierarchy. It should be the normal condition of a life supported by just design.
What I am arguing for is a society where ordinary people can live without having to ask permission at every turn. A free republic has to be built that way on purpose. Otherwise, liberty remains fragile and easy to revoke the moment survival is put back under someone else’s control.
That is what Enlightenment Socialism means to me. A political order that makes freedom durable enough to be ordinary.
Brandon King is an entrepreneur, labor advocate and political activist, and former candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives. Subscribe to his Substack.
 | A guest post by
|