> From Chomsky, "Class Warfare" (1995):
>
> "The founders of classical liberalism, people like Adam Smith and
> Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is one of the great exponents of classical
> liberalism, and who inspired John Stuart Mill -- they were what we would
> call libertarian socialists, at least that ïs the way I read them. For
> example, Humboldt, like Smith, says, Consider a craftsman who builds
> some beautiful thing. Humboldt says if he does it under external
> coercion, like pay, for wages, we may admire what he does but we despise
> what he is. On the other hand, if he does it out of his own free,
> creative expression of himself, under free will, not under external
> coercion of wage labor, then we also admire what he is because he's a
> human being. He said any decent socioeconomic system will be based on
> the assumption that people have the freedom to inquire and create --
> since that's the fundamental nature of humans -- in free association
> with others, but certainly not under the kinds of external constraints
> that came to be called capitalism."
>
> Individualism of a sort, perhaps - the best sort, I'd say - but hardly
> fundamentally conventional.
==================
Except leaving free will and fundamental nature utterly undefined is rather conventional.
Leftists have had several hundred years to think up a set of contracts that would get rid of what is regarded as the unfreedom of wage labor; how hard can it be to get the world's best lawyers to think of something better for the sake of freedom? I leave aside the role of legal professionals in sustaining the unfreedoms of the working class in the nations of the world.
Otoh, if the dissolution of class is the what the working class will/should seize the State for, amongst other "things", how will the State secure the liberties of people when their wants conflict? Through law?