Is the Left Reactionary?

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In an article entitled

Is Marxism right-wing?

Geoffrey Hodgson concludes:

Marxism – which advocates class dictatorship and the abolition of private property – cannot offer a secure foundation for democratic institutions and human rights. At least for the present, the best options for humanity are those forms of welfare-state capitalism that have been able to sustain such institutions and rights, while keeping extreme economic inequality in check. The task is to reform capitalism rather to follow Marxism. 

For the Left in 1789, the Right were supporters of a hereditary elite and their oppressive state machine. Under Marxist regimes the elite ceased to be hereditary, but the state vastly increased its power. There is good reason to see both forms of absolutism as right-wing. 

The primary struggle of the twenty-first century is not between private and public ownership, whatever their merits in different contexts. It is between liberty, rights and democracy on the one hand, and authoritarian nationalism on the other. It is the age-old struggle for universal human rights, rather than the regressive struggle of one nation, ethnicity, religion or class against another.

The source.

I like Hodgson's approach, as it gives a fruitful boost to efforts at understanding the eclectic and multi-layered structure that we find also in ideologies attributed to the left.

The liberal/libertarian attitude is problematic in that it tends to ignore the social importance of collective institutions and the enormous potential of the state to improve the living conditions of mankind. 

Conversely, the left tends to take an uncritical, even a glorifying, view of the state, as soon as the latter shows promise to act as a powerful instrument for implementing the left's objectives. This infatuation with the all-mighty state the left shares with the right.

[Der Marxismus ist nach Hodgson als eine Form des Rechtsradikalismus zu klassifizieren, insofern, als er, demokratische Institutionen und Menschenrechte ablehnend, sich unweigerlich einer unterdrückerischen Staatsmaschinerie bedienen muss, um seine Ziele und das heißt vor allem überhaupt seine Existenz als staatliches Gebilde zu ermöglichen.

Ich finde den Ansatz fruchtbar, weil ich glaube, dass auch die Ideologien, die wir der Linken zurechnen, vielschichtig sind, und durchaus auch reaktionäre und in Hodgsons Sinne rechtsradikale Elemente in sich aufnehmen.

Besteht das Manko liberaler Gesinnung in einer Ausblendung der sozialen Bedeutung kollektiver Institutionen und des enorm großen Potenzials des Staats bei der Verbesserung der Lebensbedingungen der Menschen, so neigt die Linke dazu, den Staat unkritisch wahrzunehmen, ja zu verherrlichen, sobald er sich als Instrument ihrer Ziele zu eignen scheint. Dies freilich macht die Linke deckungsgleich mit der staatsvergottenden Rechten.]

See also Liberals and the Left.