> now, i'm starting to think that what you are talking about are
> movements inspired by liberalism, in which case the issue is: context.
> what's inspiring is the ideals of liberalism as contrasted to whatever
> was around at the time. (e.g., feudalism for w. europe)
No. I'm talking about - for example - Karl Marx's party, the German SPD, once it became a politically potent party, after Marx's death. A typical activist in this party in, say, 1912 (its breakthrough year) would be a skilled male mfg worker active in his union, interested in SPD affairs, who often attended socialist lectures and read socialist newspapers and understood what he was reading and hearing.
This person would probably call himself a "Marxist." But his idea of Marxism was very different than yours. For example, the whole question of whether "an individual must experience, and thus know, for herself" probably would never have entered this person's head. This is an important question for you and your Marxism; not for him, though. And not for the vast majority of people who made up the social base of "Marxist" political parties in the West. (Including even the minority who took a special amateur interest in "Marxism," like our hypothetical 1912 worker.)
If you want an idea of what such people thought of when they thought of "Marxism," look at Kautsky's pamphlet The Class Struggle, which was written as a commentary/explanation of the SPD's 1892 Erfurt Program - this was the party program by whose adoption Karl Marx's protégés finally succeeded in their decades-long struggle to officially turn the party into (what they they of as) a Marxist party: http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/index.htm Almost all the "Marxist" intellectual questions that you see as important are absent from this pamphlet - a text from which millions and millions of people all over the world got their idea of "Marxism."
So I'm saying that while your distinction between "Marxism" and "Enlightenment Liberalism" may have some validity in a philosophical sense, it does not actually describe a real historical distinction between "Marxism: the political practice" and "Enlightenment Liberalism: the political practice" (if there is such a thing).
*Marxism*, as actually conceptualized by real, breathing Marxist mass movements that actually existed in history, was probably much closer to your idea of "Enlightenment Liberalism" than to your idea of "Marxism."
History!
SA