In 1966 the Japanese New Left thinker Yoshimoto Taka’aki published his seminal book on Karl Marx. The originality of this overview of Marx’s ideas and life lay in Yoshimoto’s stress on the young Marx’s theory of alienation as an outgrowth of a unique philosophy of nature, whose roots went back to the latter’s doctoral dissertation. It echoed Yoshimoto’s own reformulation of “alienation” (and Marx’s labor theory of value) as key concept in his theory of literary language (What is Beauty in Language), which he had just completed in 1965, and extended his argument – ongoing from the mid-1950s – with Japanese Marxism over questions of literature, politics, and culture. His extraction of the theme of “communal illusion” from the early Marx foregrounds his second major theoretical work of the decade, Communal Illusion, which he started to serialize in 1966 and completed in 1968, and outlines an important theoretical closure to the existential, political, and intellectual struggles he had waged since the end of the Pacific War. Karl Marx thus offers a powerful microcosmic glimpse of Yoshimoto’s achievements at the height of his seminal influence on the Japanese New Left.
Presented here are the complete translation of Karl Marx and a selection of related materials relevant to Yoshimoto’s reading of Marx, along with a commentary that situates this text in the context of his life, with some suggestions as to its significance within the comparative context of contemporary Western Marxism. What emerges is Yoshimoto’s existentially committed, conceptually bold rereading of Karl Marx that refuses trucking with all Marxist traditions and that is firmly grounded in the actuality of popular experience that Yoshimoto learned viscerally from the three major defeats of his life: Japanese defeat in World War II in 1945, defeat of labor union struggle on the shop floor in 1953-54, and defeat of the anti-Anpo (U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty) movement in 1960.