It is not to free people, it is to free the abstract idea of people. This is how leftists are as tyrannical as everyone. They have a romantic idea of the poor which is not tied to their actual existence or wants, and act on it. Too often, it is just a way to morally justify their own wants or desires. Any evil can be justified if it helps a faceless mass of people.
It is actually quite fun to read Dostoevsky’s Idiot with that in mind that Dostoevsky might have written Prince Myshkin (the Idiot) with Leo Tolstoy in mind. Dostoevsky was very much not a man of means, whereas Tolstoy literally came from a line of nobility. To Dostoevsky, Tolstoy’s talk of the impoverished must have sounded like he had no idea what he was talking about.
That being said, I do think that romanticism of the poor is a really old school mentality, maybe some boomers sometimes still engage in it, but I doubt that you’ll find contemporary leftists engaging in it. Today’s left is much more AOC and Greta Thunberg complaining about how shitty life is for the poor (with a substantial retweet history each backing up poor people calling for it).
