Evelyn Reed, Gloria Joseph. Liberalism A worldview that developed as a result of increasing middle-class involvement in politics in Europe. Treating liberalism as an ideology may be inappropriate, because it reflects a somewhat pragmatic approach to satisfying the political and economic interests of the middle class. It can be better identified as a belief system or a worldview, because liberal political thought has developed primarily from a group of people with similar socio-economic characteristics and often similar social backgrounds. Equality is often thought as either comparable power within a competitive power structure, or identical political rights, with a blind-eye to inequalities in power.
Human history progresses because of essential contradictions centered upon the form of production.
Literature by Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels is available on the Internet. Academic materialism is found in lots of university sociology courses, as well as in the work of some historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and so on. Because of this, academic marxists have often been considered by people involved in communist parties, at best unreliable because of their privileged social position and at worst opportunistic. Maoist groups like the tiny Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party can be found if you look hard enough. Reformism usually used as a perjorative, refers to political practice or ideology that attempts to make gradual changes within exising social and political structures to improve the conditions of people under those structures.