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I would not say that the Left is reactionary or conservative, it is more that it accepts certain broadly French liberal thinking as described by Rousseau, specifically in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men, where he claimed that a man in his natural state was free and that society enslaves him. That is the core idea behind leftist concept of liberation - to return to this mythical state of things where hierarchies were supposedly flat and there was material equality - but in modern society. I will just add that all these assumptions regarding noble savage is proven as unscientific, but nevertheless it is still at the core of even modern leftism. So much for science. Marx added the dialectical process behind it and added concepts such as alienation. For him what makes human is his ability to produce his own vision, not to work for anybody else such as capitalists. In his analysis of stages of history the very first stage is called primitive communism, the later stages are just a historical process until the true communism is achieved - again something like primitive communism but inside modern industrial society.
So I would not necessarily say that leftism is reactionary or that they want to return to some actual scientifically grounded previous state of history. Rather leftists created an idea of their utopia, and put it into historical and materialistic context - either in the past or in the future or both - which gives this ideology veneer of science and evidence. But it is as imaginary, false and spiritual as any religious thinking, my closest comparison would be something like Scientology which talks about extraterrestrial alien race called Xenu and tries to marry materialism with spiritualism.
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