Traces of the Ethical in Michael Sprinker's Marxism

John Krapp Traces of the Ethical in Michael Sprinker's Marxism I firstencountered the work ofKarl Marx in an undergraduate ethics class while reading Erich Fromm's analysis of the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts." I am able to recall one sentence from Fromm's text as easily as when I read it fifteen years ago: "Alienation leads to the perversion of all values" (54). Fromm's challenge led me directly to the "Manuscripts" themselves, where in the context of a discussion of the morality of political economy, Marx refers to the "bestial degeneration" caused by alienation, the "mephitic and pestilential breath . . . [the] pollution and putrefaction of man, the sewage ... of dvilization" that occurs as a result of the dehumanizing effects of capitalism (359; emphasis in the original). In this passage, Marx is especially careful to note thathis metaphors are to be taken literally, by which he means that physical filth comes more and more to characterize the material element in which man lives under conditions where the desire for the accumulation of capital eclipses the pursuit of virtue and good consdence (362). At the time, I wasn't fooled by Marx's attempt to keep his readers' attention where he most wanted it—on the socio-political consequences of relations of production under capitalism. On my earliest understanding of Marx, nothing could convince me that ethics was not the subtext of Marx's entire project, which could be distilled epigrammaticalry along the lines that capitalism is bad because it is immoral, and communism is good because it is morally correct. Marx, I reasoned, had to believe that capitalism deserved to be superseded by a more fully humanizing, egalitarian sodo-economic arrangement because it was wrong to treat human beings the way capitalism treated human beings. Absent this simple truth, there was just no reason why Marx should have spilt so much ink in the course of his lifetime. Having mastered Marx at twenty, I moved on to other things. I re-encountered Marx's corpus via Michael Sprinker as a mode of understanding aesthetic ideology. It seemed that any hint of ethical language had vanished from Sprinker's Marx, replaced by rigorous engagement with the sdence of historical materialism conducted in a language far removed from anything I had seen in either Fromm or Marx. But I remained convinced that it was impossible to speak about Marx without assuming a correlative ethical position. Even the title of Stony Brook's fall 2000 memorial conference to Sprinker, "Seeds of Liberation: Sowing Radical Ideas in Conservative Times," implies that the work Michael diligently pursued throughout his career had a specific value; that is, that it is a good thing to be emandpated from the structures and discourses designed to conserve capitalist socioeconomic relations and their attendant ideologies. In order to trace the ethical moment of Sprinker's Marxism, it might be useful to look first at the most uncharacteristically self-disclosive sequence 162 the minnesota review in Sprinker's writing of which I, at any rate, am aware. It occurs in his defense of historically grounded criticism in Shakespeare Left and Right. Writing of his ambivalence in undergraduate school towards those who set popular opinion, Sprinker confesses that "I wanted—desperately—to be let into the dub and believed that by acquiring sufficient cultural capital I might get in without having to pay the customary price of earning a handsome income from more or less dubious pursuits" (119). He proceeds to recount how, shortly after winning his first full-time teaching position out of graduate school, he "came upon a book that explained to me for the first time why my graduate training had been so distasteful and helped me to rethink my position as a literature teacher along lines that enabled me to diminish my increasing alienation from my students and also to alleviate an already nagging sense of having become a traitor to my class" ("You've" 119). It was but a short step to "Marx and Engels, later Althusser, Gramsd, and Lenin" as the "theoretical armature" that would enable him to practice the study of literature within the academy without the necessity of reproducing the culture of bourgeois privilege...