By Manuel de la Cruz, translation by Alberto R Zambrano U

From the perspective of political sciences, the left encompasses every movement that advocates for horizontal societal configurations. Be that as it may, it can be equality by means of liberal judicial polity, or by socialist economic equality.

Jacobins, liberals —and in some fashions, anarchists— were the first European leftist movements. The socialist weltanschaaung is the direct heir of liberalism and its first authors vindicated the liberal leitmotif of a society of free and equal men, coupled with the introduction of economic reforms that assured equality in real terms. And by real terms, they meant the economy sphere.

The original socialist, far from entering in the contradictions of liberal categories, was always a political scientist with the capacity of materializing freedom amongst its peers. Moreover, that thought led him to believe that freedom was relative, atomized and in accordance to a general consensus that “either everybody is free equally, or nobody is”. And that train of thought derived in Marxist radicalization and the post-Marxist train of thought of those liberals who decided to embrace the commune.

It’s important to note that liberal freedom, or modern freedom, contradicts the freedom of the classic form.

In the classic era, a society was free when every one of its components could configure an order to submit, to reach public happiness. The non-domination of a foreign goverment made the Polis free: that created the incentives for the citizens to go to arms every time a foreign empire decided to enslave them. That dichotomy of freeman-slave was quaintly defined and yet it did the work in a remarkable manner.

The classic freedom, public freedom, doesn’t consider men equal amongst themselves. That’s why the roles they assume in the political order, and their capacities would give them different tasks and different entitlements. That’s why we must talk about private legislation, privileges, and designations of unequal degrees of liberty.

Feudal nobility, for example, gives hereditary rights to merits and services to a family for a kingdom or realm. The marquis, responsible for a border of strategic importance had all the privileges for his title. Noblesse obliges.

For liberals, who consider all men to be equal, liberty must be enjoyed in equal terms. Nobody should have less liberties than the one next to him. But contradictorily, seeking to abolish that hierarchical distinction of the degrees of freedom, they abolish and replace freedom as a noun, by the discourse of “liberties”: those are prerogatives that we have just by being human.

So, the diaphanous distinction between being free or being a slave, is being diluted in legal trivialities of inferior precept such as freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of movement, freedom to marry with people of the same sex, the freedom to think that sex is a social construction, the freedom to have an abortion… and so on, until displacing with a mare magnum of freedoms, demands and guarantees the fundamental fact of freedom: free is only he who does not he is a slave.

It is logical that the liberal classrooms formed castes of politicians who, faced with the biological impossibility of being absolutely free, would settle for the prerogative of at least achieving equality, even in slavery.

Therefore, the State went from being an enemy to be abolished, to being a necessary evil and an instrument for egalitarian leveling. Socialists, in a sense, are still quite liberal. They intend to strip us of inequalities through a transitory slave economic order that, after the demolition of the traditional structures of religion, family, country and property, obtain a new man sufficiently homogenized to be able to enjoy full freedom.

Of course, a contemporary liberal would deny such an ideological genealogy, perhaps hiding behind novel categories such as libertarianism. And even his socialist opponents, those who find liberal freedom insufficient, would be outraged.

Both are, after all, heirs to the main Jacobin and bourgeois revolutions that hit Europe after the advent of rationalism. More than economic, their mutual ancestry is of a theological order: they are the prophets of the Goddess reason, and their fight against traditional superstition.

It is these rational gentlemen, organized in lodges, who by proclaiming themselves lovers of the human race have done the most damage to it in the world of ideas. In the words of Laureano Vallenilla Lanz «The worshipers of the goddess Reason have been the least reasonable men in the entire world; the friends of the people have been the ones who have shed their blood most abundantly and have dragged it into crime and misery».