ABSTRACT
In 1966 Yoshimoto Ryūmei/Taka’aki published his seminal book on Karl Marx. It echoed Yoshimoto’s own reformulation of Marx’s concept of ‘alienation’ and labor theory of value for the analysis of literary linguistic expression in What is Beauty in Language? (1965), which extended his argument—ongoing since the mid-1950s—with Japanese Marxism over questions of literature, politics, and culture. Yoshimoto extracted the concept of ‘communal illusion’ from The German Ideology, foregrounding his second major theoretical work of the decade, Communal Illusion, which he started to serialize also in 1966 and completed in 1968. This seminal text formed a theoretical closure to the existential, political, and intellectual struggles for autonomy he had waged since the end of the Pacific War and paralleled the non-sectarian radical current developing in the movement. It forged an existentially committed, conceptually bold rereading of Karl Marx, independent from existing Marxist traditions and firmly grounded in the actuality of popular experience that Yoshimoto distilled from the major defeats of his life: Japanese defeat in World War II in 1945, defeat of labor union struggle on the shop floor in 1953–1954, and defeat of the anti-Anpo (US–Japan Mutual Security Treaty) movement in 1960.
