| Summary: | This paper aims to show that two eminent Marxists in the 1930s, the Italian Antonio Gramsci and the Japanese
Tosaka Jun, shared three important characteristics of so-called Western Marxism: the methodological development of
Marxism, the focus on the superstructure, and the pessimism about the impossibility of immediate revolution.
Showing that Gramsci and Tosaka shared these characteristics enables us to revisit the framework of “Western
Marxism,” which confusingly consists of both theoretical characteristics and geographical criteria. Looking at Gramsci
and Tosaka on the same plane allows us to revisit Marxist thought different from the orthodox Marxism in Soviet
Russia, and not strictly as a Western, but as a part of potentially global movement of thought.
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