This conclusion is a widely familiar concept, if not a populist one.

However, the reasoning that leads to it is not as familiar; and it is this reasoning that is more important than the rhetoric and advocacy for individual freedoms and liberties that come with classical liberalism.

Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote an essay titled "Limits of State Action" in 1792 and asserted that the state tends to, "make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking his individual purposes".

Since humans are inherently free, searching, self-perfecting beings, it then follows that the state by its very nature is profoundly an anti-human institution.

In this regard, state actions are viewed as ultimately incompatible with the full harmonious development of human potential in its richest diversity and the true destiny of man, as propounded by such luminary scholars as Bakunin, Stuart Mill and Karl Marx.

The modern day conservatives in the West regard themselves as the lineal descendants of the classical liberal tradition.

Noam Chomsky says this can only be true from an extremely superficial point of view, but not when one carries out detailed studies of the fundamental ideas of classical libertarian thought.

Man's central attribute is his freedom and this was the central theme for Humboldt, Rousseau and the Cartesians. The basic assertion is that all human pursuits revolve more or less on the urge to inquire and to create.

Humboldt wrote; "all moral culture springs solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul, and can . . . never (be) produced by external and artificial contrivances".

In essence, man's understanding is generally achieved by his own activity, his own ingenuity, or his own methods of using the discoveries of others.

The theory of alienated labour and exploitation as propounded by Karl Marx is largely emanating from these assumptions.

Man's nature is that he regards what he does as his own more than he regards what he possesses as his own. Humboldt wrote, "The labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits".

Human action is in essence that which flows from man's inner impulse.

The peasant and newly-settled small scale farmer in Zimbabwe and the craftsmen carving stones can easily be elevated into artists, that is people who love labour for its own sake, improve it by their own creativity and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their own sense of satisfaction.

It is the seemingly degrading position of the newly-settled farmer and the peasant that will ennoble the intention and ability of these people to freely achieve for themselves and for the nation the ultimate goal of producing food for the nation, not as tools of alienated labour but freely enterprising individuals.

Freedom is that undoubtable and indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature can hardly be achieved.

All actions of coercion and force are alien to the true nature of human beings, and when these actions are successfully carried out by those instructed to carry them out; they are not performed with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.

All action enticed or forced from a human being without that being's free choice does not enter the individual's very being — it is alien to his nature.

When an individual acts in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instructions rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, there is always a huge problem.

That individual can be admired for what he does, but will always be despised for what he is.

It is like why MDC-T's Morgan Tsvangirai is widely respected for his bravery and courage as a political leader, but also universally condemned as a puppet of his Western makers and financial backers.

People know that Tsvangirai's free choice is to respect the liberation legacy of his homeland, Zimbabwe, as is his hidden support for landless blacks' reclaiming of land that was stolen from them through colonisation.

He is a torn soul in the valley of indecisiveness — to be or not be — he fights daily between his insatiable want for money, and his very nature as a man born and bred under unmistakable white oppression.

So he has a side that identifies with nationalistic values and the quest for true freedom for black Zimbabweans.

But he has to put up this brave face that preaches a democracy and change as sponsored and prescribed by those who despise Zimbabwe's liberation legacy and are solidly opposed to the land reclamation programme that took way most of the arable land from colonial settlers, their kith and kin.

His determination against the odds from Zanu-PF is quite admirable to many, but his identity as the black voice fronting white bitterness is most unmistakable and extremely deplorable.

It is like admiring the mansion built from the proceeds of prostitution or crime.

The house may be admirable, but what the owner is will forever be despised — them standing as the unwanted prostitute or criminal.

That Morgan Tsvangirai is a deplorable puppet of the West is undeniable and indefensible from any angle of apologetics.

Christopher Dell confirmed that the MDC is nothing but a tool in the hand of the United States — all set to establish the will and intentions of the later in reversing Zimbabwe's land reform programme.

He bemoaned the incapacities and lack of talent in Tsvangirai — revealing explicitly that Tendai Biti and Nelson Chamisa would make a lot better puppets than the "flawed" Tsvangirai.

This is what Dell, the former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe had to say, "Zimbabwe's opposition is far from ideal and I leave convinced that had we had different partners, we could have achieved more already. But you have to play the hand you're dealt.

With that in mind, the current leadership has little executive experience and will require massive hand holding and assistance should they ever come to power."

He further wrote, "We need to keep the pressure on in order to keep Mugabe off his game and on his back foot, relying on his own shortcomings to do him in."

The leaked document confirms to zero doubt that the MDC-T is no more than a Western-created and ill-fated regime change project, in which Tsvangirai is employed as a treacherous puppet tasked to fight for Western racist interests within Zimbabwe.

The man is just fighting against his own nature and that is why the Americans are not pleased with his confusion.

As Humboldt put it, man is born to inquire and to create, and when a man or a child chooses to inquire or create out of his own free choice, then he becomes in his own terms an artist rather than a tool of production or a well-trained parrot.

Karl Marx followed this up by writing about "the alienation of labour when work is external to the worker . . . not part of his nature . . . (so that) he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself . . . and is physically exhausted and mentally debased".

Marx was highly critical of division of labour and he argued that it took away the humanity in workers and reduced all of them to unthinking appendages of machines.

Robert Tucker observed that Karl Marx saw the revolutionary more as the frustrated producer than as a dissatisfied consumer.

This kind of radical criticism for capitalist relations of production flows from the libertarian thought of the Enlightenment. In this sense, classical liberal ideas are essentially anti-capitalist, though not in the way they started and developed.

The true essence of classical liberal ideas must be destroyed for the ideology to effectively serve modern industrial capitalism.

Corporate capitalism has redefined the notion of the private person and as Rodolf Rocker wrote, "Democracy with its motto of ‘equality of all citizens before the law,' and Liberalism with its ‘right of man over his own person' both (would be) shipwrecked on the realities of the capitalist economic form".

In the predatory capitalist economy such as we have today, state intervention is an absolute necessity to preserve human existence and prevent the total destruction of the physical environment, and this is from a very optimistic point of view.

Karl Polanyi wrote that the self-adjusting market "could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness".

Humboldt did not during his time foresee the consequences of the commodity character of labour, the doctrine aptly described by Polanyi when he wrote "it is not for the commodity to decide where it should be used, at what price it should be allowed to change hands, and in what manner it should be consumed or destroyed".

Given that the commodity in question here is about human life, social protection is therefore a minimal necessity to constrain the irrational and destructive workings of the classical free market.

Something that Humboldt did not foresee was that capitalist economic relations would perpetuate a form of bondage described by Simon Linguet as worse than slavery.

Said Linguet, "It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live.

"It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him all the more".

The end of slavery resulted in this vainglorious gain where the waged labourer has only been able to be at every moment tormented by the fear of death from hunger, a calamity that at least never visited his predecessor in the lowest form of mankind.

The freedom of the waged labourer from slavery has become his misfortune.

With no master that owns him as a person he has one who is the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need.

Need today is the master that has reduced Africans to the most cruel dependence on their former slave masters and colonisers. Need is the reason Morgan Tsvangirai takes puppet politics money from the West. Need has made this man to sell his own soul.

Need is why the people of Zimbabwe stand so grateful to the neo-colonial agencies from the West, the so-called NGOs. Need is what has killed the African initiative and sense of imagination. Need is a crippling master with no mercy.

The most degrading thing that can ever happen to human nature is bondage and it is sad to note that bondage did not go away with slavery, and neither did it go away with the fall of colonial empires.

The first emancipation made serfs out of slaves, the second made wage earners out of serfs, and the third will transform the proletariat into free men by eliminating the commodity character of labour, ending wage slavery, and bringing the commercial, industrial, and financial institutions under democratic control.

Although Humboldt in his classical liberalism doctrine did not express or see these things, there are logical reasons to assume that he might have accepted these conclusions, especially given that he does agree that state intervention in social life is legitimate, "if freedom would destroy the very conditions without which not only freedom but even existence itself would be inconceivable".

These are precisely the conditions that arise in an unconstrained capitalist economy, the so-called free market economy — something that developing nations are being coerced by the West to embrace without any form of state intervention.

The 51 percent local ownership of industry as legislated by Zimbabwe is a form of state intervention meant to achieve nationalistic goals aimed at eliminating foreign control of natural resources. However, the policy may be doing no more than transferring capitalist power from aliens to locals, with the capitalist tradition of the alienated labour still firmly in place. There is need to democratise capital the same way land ownership was democratised in 2000.

Classical liberalism as propounded by Humboldt must best evolve into libertarian socialism if the modern trends in Africa are correctly factored in, and this is what Zimbabwe needs to focus on.

Here we are talking about elements like the guarantee of individual rights that has so far achieved remarkable realisation — though tragically flawed — in Western democracies, in the Israeli kibbutzim, even in the Nyerere experiments of Ujamah in Tanzania, the workers councils in the former Yugoslavia, the social projects of Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso and in Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian social projects, and of course the resettled former landless Zimbabweans.

These are all examples of efforts to awaken popular consciousness and to create a new involvement in the social process, something so fundamental in the transformation of developing nations, especially those in Africa.

In summary, this writer is saying classical liberalism is based on the doctrine that state functions should be drastically limited, but such a suggestion is only at a very superficial level.

The deeper meaning is that the classical liberal view develops from a certain concept of human nature, one that stresses the importance of diversity and free creation, and therefore this view is in fundamental opposition to industrial capitalism with its wage slavery, its alienated labour, and its hierarchical and authoritarian principles of social and economic organisation.

In its ideal form, classical liberal thought is opposed to the concepts of possessive individualism that are intrinsic to capitalist ideology.

Classical liberalism seeks to eliminate social fetters and to replace them with social bonds, and not with competitive greed, predatory individualism, and not with corporate empires, whether state or privately owned.

This is probably what Africa must be aiming to achieve in its quest to develop into an industrialised society.

Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawarova. com or visit www.rwafawarova.com