If you look at the history of left-wing philosophies- from Rousseau to Marx, from the post-structuralists to third-wave feminism- you can see that there are five assumptions in all of them. What's interesting is that all of these philosophies, no matter how different they are from each other, share the same five assumptions. You might say that having these axioms at their core is what makes a philosophy left-wing in the first place.
Of course, political philosophy is not math. These assumption aren't always stated as facts. Most of the time they are just assumed by the philosopher without really thinking about them. You might say they form the skeleton upon which the vast superstructure of the ideology is built on. The superstructures of different left-wing ideologies can differ a lot between them, but the skeleton remains the same.
In the following articles we will look at why these assumptions are false. For now we will just list them.
- Society in its natural state is made up of free atomized individuals.
- Nature is bountiful and good.
- Social conventions are inherently opressive and unnatural.
- The State is not an autonomous organisation, but a tool to implement decisions taken in the society.
- The human mind is independent of time.