ORGANIZATION & ENVIRONMENTANTI-PROMETHEUS, POST-MARX Sheasby / / March 1999

Articles

ANTI-PROMETHEUS, POST-MARX
The Real and the Myth in Green Theory

WALT SHEASBY
Rio Hondo Community College
The Greens are a diverse phenomenon embracing various theories and practices, but there is a widespread view that Karl Marx embraced economic gigantism and megatechnology, for which writers of many persuasions since the mid-1950s have deployed the symbol of Prometheus. As used by critics, the charge of Prometheanism helps dissuade those committed to radical democracy and ecology from considering Marx for themselves. The myth of Prometheus is sometimes used to distinguish Marx from those in his century who are known to have criticized the domination of nature, especially the romantic poets and artists. Some critics think it is important to construct a Green theory that is free from left traditions, invoking as an alternative John Ruskin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Morris. This article reconstructs the meanings of the Prometheus saga, challenges the distortion of Marx, and asserts his continuity with a tradition of human liberation and defense of nature.

mong environmentalists, the interdiction against Prometheus has become litany. The editor of a major anthology of Green theory (Andrew Dobson) sets forth the reason for driving away the fallen champ: The science of ecology teaches us that we are part of a system . . . and that the whole planetary community is bound by ties of interdependence which make a mockery of mastery. There is no room for Prometheus here (Dobson, 1991, p. 8). According to a number of Green theorists, the oversized alien is unwelcome in this land, especially when we learn that this unnatural man is the Mr. Hyde to a certain Dr. Marx. As one Social Ecology critic (John Clark, 1989) warns, Marxs Promethean . . . man is a being who is not at home in nature. . . . He is an indomitable spirit who must subject nature in his quest for self-realization (p. 258). A liberal critic (Victor Ferkiss, 1993) remonstrates that Marxs attitude toward the world always retained that Promethean thrust, glorifying the human conquest of nature (p. 108). A postmodern environmentalist (Wade Sikorski, 1993) declares that Marx . . . was one of our ages most devout worshippers of the machine. Capitalism was to be forgiven its sins because . . . it was in the process of perfecting the machine (p. 138). Another leading critic on the left (Ted Benton, 1989) similarly calls Marxs perspective a Promethean, productivist view of history (p. 82). Even a supposedly close student of Marx (Anthony Giddens, 1981) agrees that overall a Promethean attitude (in which nature is treated simply in instrumental terms) is pre-eminent in Marx (pp. 59-60).

Organization & Environment, Vol. 12 No. 1, March 1999 5-44 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.

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As John Bellamy Foster, who cites these critics, observes, it is the charge of Prometheanism that occupies a central place in green criticisms of Marx (Foster 1997a, p. 282; Foster, 1997b, pp. 149-150). Like many Green critics, Charlene Spretnak, an advocate of Spiritual Ecological Postmodernism who has contributed much to the Greens, associates Marxs theory with the ideology of bureaucratic development and its notorious practices: Marxism-Leninism was one of several economic systems that share the assumptions of the modern worldview. She feels that Promethean assumptions of modernity, now played out with hypermodern intensity, are causing detrimental transformations of economics, governance, and education (Spretnak, 1997, pp. 40, 87). Through some transmogrification, this mythologem has emerged out of the lore of the ancestors of the ancient Greeks; like a creature spawned and mutated by Hollywood, it has now come to symbolize modern industrialism, with its domination of nature by economic gigantism and megatechnology. And because Marx is known to associate with this rogue, whose very title is Titan, there is a presumption of his complicity. We need to bring Prometheus and Marx to justice rather than hissing an alarum that frightens jurors away without their being allowed to consider the evidence. Beyond the special effects, there are lessons that still remain intriguing and relevant when we probe more carefully into the character of myths such as Prometheus. And the condemning of Marx to oblivion without a fair trial, a verdict that long predates the postmoderns, has justifiably been called the great evasion by a dean of historians: The tactics of escape employed in this headlong dash from reality would fill a manual of equivocation, a handbook of hairsplitting, and a guidebook to changing the subject (W. A. Williams, 1964, p. 18). In this article, I intend to show, first, the historical and cultural contexts in which the real Marx and others used the story of Prometheus, in contrast with the distortions of his 20th-century critics. Second, I will look at what is at stake in the analysis that Marx contributes to Green theory today (such as the relation of technology to alienated labor, the goal of recreating human sociality within nature, and the strategy of democratic change from below). In addition, I will look at the standing of other witnesses before the court and compare their ideas with Marx. Greens have often defined Marxs Prometheanism not by studying Marx but by contrasting his assumed ideas with notable 19th-century critics of the domination of nature, particularly those within the romantic tradition, to recover what Spretnak calls a heritage of resistance (Spretnak cited in Mills, 1997, p. 164). But this historical path is shaded by what I think is a misreading of a mythic and utopian tradition that reaches from Aeschylus to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the attempt to construct a romantic Green politics free of left traditions, in particular by juxtaposing William Morris and Karl Marx, is untenable. THE BIRTH OF RED PROMETHEUS This attitude of environmentalists in the 1990s closely parallels that of mainstream social thought in the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, as academic critics sought to counter the myths and ideologies of the left. This new social science did not have its roots in either classical liberalism or conservatism but reflected the influence of two of the most important independent Marxists of the previous decades: Sidney Hook (1902-1989), whose conservative transformation has been recounted recently (Phelps, 1997), and Max Shachtman (1904-1972), whose Odyssey to State Department socialist has also been told (Drucker, 1994). As Daniel Bell recounted, this was the era when Arthur Koestler and five other

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intellectuals declared that Marxism was The God That Failed (Grossman, 1950), and for a generation 20 years younger, Hook and Shachtman provided a postMarxist orientation that was reflected in magazines such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New Leader (Bell, 1962a, p. 311). The early focus was on the authoritarian meaning of the socialist myth, which had a hold on left intellectuals, as Peter Berger argued: Myths derive their power from those realms of the mind in which the gods used to dwell, and the gods have always been relentless (Steinfels, 1979, p. 196). Psychoanalytic-style explanations of Marx as an authoritarian who was virtually demonized as a Red Prometheus became a theme of cold war sociology and political science. We know the genealogy of this fable. According to Daniel Bell (1962a), writing in the Free Press edition of The End of Ideology,
The most comprehensive exposition of the early views of Marx is in the unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Harvard, 1957) by Robert W. Tucker, entitled The Self and Revolution: A Moral Critique of Karl Marx. Mr. Tuckers work is the first to trace at length the transposition of Marxs philosophical thought to economic categories. I am indebted to him for many insights. (p. 433)

In a subsequent Collier Books edition, Bell said, This study was published in 1960 by Cambridge University Press as The Alienated World of Karl Marx. The proposed title became less idiosyncratic. It was published by Cambridge with a March 1961 preface as Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. There, Tucker (1961) expressed gratitude for comments received from a sociology professor at Harvard, Daniel Bell (p. 7). The blurb on the Collier edition of The End of Ideology noted that Bell joined the Young Peoples Socialist League in 1932 at the precocious age of 13 (Bell, 1962b, p. 1). In the late 1930s, Bell had been part of the independent socialist student circle at City College of New York (along with Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and Melvin Lasky), in which Professor Sidney Hook, who had never been a supporter of Stalin, was just beginning his uneasy break with Marxs revolutionary theory, anthologized in his 1940 collection titled Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (Hook, 1966; Steinfels, 1979, p. 82). Bell naturally dedicated his book For Sidney Hook. For Tucker, and others to follow, Marxs analysis of alienation was simply an expression of his own alienated soul, which aspired to Promethean power: He succumbed to the spell of a philosophical system in which the urge to be godlike receives the highest metaphysical sanction and is pictured as the motive force of the history of the world. Tucker explained that what Marx found in Hegel was the idea that man is God. Hegelianism was the philosophy whose very own confession was that of Prometheus (Tucker, 1961, pp. 74f). One could almost hear the chortles and ravings of the mad doctor, Herr Marx, as he concocted brimstone formulae out of the Phnomenologie des Geistes. In his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell saw Marxs character as simultaneously Faustian and Promethean on the basis that it might be noted that Marx, himself an admirer of Prometheus, read Faust in Promethean terms (Bell, 1976/1996, p. 160). A more ambitious analysis of The Character and Thought of Karl Marx: The Promethean Complex and Historical Materialism appeared in the form of Lewis S. Feuers essay in the December 1968 Encounter magazine. The essay was included in his 1969 work titled Marx and the Intellectuals, in which he acknowledged his

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debt to Robert Tucker in his erudite study Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Feuer, 1969, p. 84). Feuer said that, with Prometheus, Marx affirmed that the technical arts were the mainspring of mans progress and Marxs Promethean complex evolved as his mythopoeic compulsion was confronted with the realities of historical defeat (Feuer, 1969, pp. 10, 29). With one wave of the therapists cigar, the New York intellectuals seemed to anticipate both an anti-Prometheus opposed to the technical arts and a post-Marx relieved that history is over. Since Tucker, potboiler biographers of Marx have over and over again revealed that he liked to think of himself as Prometheus (Payne, 1968, p. 87), that he wrote of philosophy in its Promethean independence as master of the universe (Siegel, 1978, p. 179), or that he embraced the mythic image of Prometheus, the firebringer, with whom Marx identified himself from his youth on . . . fighting not for an illusory utopia but for a reality that enjoyed the blessing of the god of the new age Science (Manuel, 1995, p. 87). Although expecting his impious offering to compare with the scientific wizardry of the master, Marx, the critics seemed to say, was only the sorcerers apprentice. PROMETHEUS AND PERSONIFICATION Apparently, none of the critics has considered Marxs criticism, in The Poverty of Philosophy, of Pierre-Joseph Proudhons methodology in his System of Economic Contradictions: The Philosophy of Poverty.
Proudhon personifies society; he turns it into a person. . . . Proudhon gives the person, Society, the name of Prometheus, whose high deeds he glorifies in these terms: . . . Prometheus invents machines, discovers new utilities in bodies, new forces in nature. . . . With every step of his industrial activity, there is an increase in the number of his products, which marks an enhancement of happiness for him. (Marx, 1969, p. 98; Marx & Engels, 1976, p. 157)

In Proudhons image of society, captured in this industrious, hedonic personification, all real social and historical content is vacated from economic doctrine. Marx says that, in a very literal and technical sense, the theory is the myth of Prometheus (Marx & Engels, 1976, pp. 157-158). There is no social reality beyond the mythologem, which is retold by Proudhon as a fable of industrialization. Proudhons theory of society is reduced to simply another of the fictional Robinsonnades of the bourgeois economists. Because it is Proudhon who misappropriates the myth to stand for industrial progress and utilitarian calculation, it is ironic that it is Marx who has been criticized for embracing a Homo Economicus version of the myth. THE PROMETHEUS SAGA IN THE CLASSICAL ERA A Prometheus quite different from that sketched by the critics emerges when we look at the actual image and language of the myth, or rather myths, because there are many variants in the classical era as well as in later adaptations. His name means fore-thinker, a characteristic that appears in virtually all of his deeds. Taking our cue from a standard definition of this character by Edward E. Hale, we can see a complex saga (Martin, 1991, p. 717). The developed character is a varying composite of many story elements: (a) He is the ingenious and thoughtful creator of men

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(who stand upright) fashioned from clay; (b) he is the tricky deceiver who turns the sacrificial meat feast at Mekone into a shell-game in which Zeus loses out to the humans, and he is the rebel who steals fire and brings it back to the humans after it was hidden by the angry Zeus; (c) he is the giver of the spark (the instigation and the means) through which humans will develop all of the arts and sciences and everything in their culture; and (d) he is a tragic and tortured victim chained in retribution by Zeus to a mountain crag, in which an eagle endlessly devours his liver by day; he is the stoic and noble sufferer for the humans, whose hearth fires he sees at night from his desolation; and he is the unbroken and finally vindicated rebel who greets his liberation calmly and without rancor but with a determination to carry on. As we examine the saga more closely, we can look for evidence of the indomitable spirit who must subject nature in his quest for self-realization (Ferkiss, 1993, p. 103) and the destructive or conquering Promethean thrust, glorifying the human conquest of nature (J. Clark, 1989, p. 258). The Sculptor of Men The story of his sculpting of clay men may have been an old folktale current in the countryside in pre-Hellenic times, but this aspect is not found in extant sources until the fourth century B.C. (Kramer, 1961, p. 267). A stone carving from the late third century B.C. (in the British Museum) shows Prometheus assembling mans skeleton; another carving, from c. 220 B.C. (in the Louvre), shows him seated and fashioning men with Athene/ M inervas help (Aghion & Lissarrague, 1996, p. 247). Much later, around 160 to 180 A.D., the geographer and mythographer Pausanias was shown an old brick hut in which the natives of Phocis said Prometheus had fashioned the figurines long ago from the clay and water on the hillside of Panopeus (Guirard, 1959, p. 98). Their mythic ancestors were called Phlegyes, or blazing men. Another locale is also purported, as Philip Freund (1965) says, to have been at the Iconium in Lycanonia: Each locality had its own story about the event. In one, the first man to appear on earth is Alalkomeneus, by the shores of Lake Kopais in Boethia (p. 123). A similar myth was recounted in a lost Greek manuscript (translated in the second century A.D. and attributed wrongly to Julius Hyginus) that says Prometheus in Boethia carved a shining boy or Phanon, but tried unsuccessfully to withhold it from Zeus, who then spun it into the void as a planetary star (Rood, 1990, p. 264). A surviving work attributed to Appolodorus has Prometheus creating both the first man and first woman out of clay (Rood, 1990, p. 264). Although local autochthonic creation myths were common and various, the endurance and ascendance of this creation myth in Hellenic Greece is surprising because the act of creation itself, as Hesiod makes clear, usurps the power of patriarchal Zeus of the Counsels, who is father of Gods and of Men (Frazer, 1983, p. 57). Prometheus may in fact be a transitional figure in pre-Hellenic Greece because creation from clay alone would seem to suggest the old Mother Power of the ancient goddess cultures (Leeming, 1994, p. 60). However, by the first century A.D. the sculptor of men was virtually a household icon in Rome, a myth popularized by patrician scholars such as Horace (65-8 B.C.), Lucian (c. 117-c. 180 A.D.) and, particularly, Ovid (43 B.C.-17 A.D.). Horace almost seemed to be invoking alchemy when he declared Prometheus first transmuted Atoms culled for human clay (Guerber, 1993, p. 15). In the Metamorphoses (Book 1), Ovid tactfully gave the reader a choice of origins:

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Then man was born. Either the architect of All, the author of the universe, in order to beget a better world, created man from seed divineor else Prometheus, son of Iapetus, made men by mixing new-made earth with fresh rainwater. (Ovid, 1993, p. 6)

Roman art and culture treated Prometheus, despite his subordinate position in the divine hierarchy, almost entirely as the kindly and thoughtful sculptor of man, not as a rebel and certainly not as anything like Spartacus. A third-century Roman sarcophagus found at Pozzuoli depicts Prometheus meditating upon man, whom he is about to bring to life; as Zeus, Poseidon, Hermes and Hera watch (Grant & Hazel, 1973, p. xi). The feeling is pastoral and aristocratic, as befits the funerary occasion of the rich. The eternal cycle of birth, life, and death is played out as seasons in the bounteous world in a sarcophagus from about 290 A.D. to 300 A.D. (now in the Museo Pio Clementino in the Vatican), in which the ox and ass, symbols of the earth that awaits plowing and sowing, are seen in the background of the creation tableaux: Prometheus never ceases to shape fresh human beings, the seasons produce their fruits for ever (Bianchi-Bandinelli, 1971, p. 48). In another context (discussing literature), Mikhail Bakhtin commented aptly that these picturesque remnants are woven together in the unstable unity of a cultured Romans private life; but they did not come together to form a single, powerful animating independent nature complex, such as we see in epic or tragedy (nature as it functions in Prometheus Bound, for instance) (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 144). Despite the obvious resemblance to the Genesis myth in the later monotheistic tradition, Prometheus was occasionally seen prefiguratively as either the rebel against God (Lucifer) or the sufferer for humanity (Jesus) but rarely as creator of men. With the Renaissance, however, the pagan creator of men was born again but had by no means the prominence of the pagan Christ. A French translation of Metamorphoses, Ovide moralis appeared around 1316-1328, and Prometheus animating men was recounted in John Gowers poem titled Confessio amantis around 1390. Many European versions of the sculptor of men followed (for later examples, see the appendix). It is often overlooked that in some variants of the myth, in which Prometheus is a creator as well as a savior of humankind, working side by side with the craftsman is Pallas Athena, Minerva. She not only teaches the arts and sciences to the Titan (who was the midwife at her birth from the head of Zeus) but she also breathes wisdom into the clay figurines made by Prometheus. As shown in the Roman sarcophagi, they are conspirators together, equally responsible for humanity and its challenge to divinity. In a sarcophagus in the Capitoline, sketched by Baumeister in 1568, Prometheus sculpts the final details on his new creation while Athena/Minerva drops her fluttering bird of wisdom onto the head of the boy-man, as Cupid and Psyche, Gaea (Tellus) and Mercury look on (Gayley, 1893/1939, pp. xix, 582). In another marble relief from a third-century A.D. sarcophagus, Prometheus shapes man while Minerva stands behind him, guiding his action with her arm on his shoulder (Roberts, Roberts, & Katz, 1997, p. 27). It is possible that the Athena/Prometheus mythic combination brings together two separate traditions of human and artistic creation, or their unity may be a holdover from the older, more feminist mythology of Aegean prehistory, with later misogynist embellishments. Prometheus may possibly have roots in the Georgian Caucuses mountains, and Athena is widely believed to have been a pre-Hellenic goddess, perhaps of the mountain-mother type (Tripp, 1970, p. 117). The very ancient Athena supposedly was originally a Minoan or Mycenaean household goddess (Monaghan, 1990, p. 42). Athenas accession over Poseidon as ruler of

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FIGURE 1:

Prometheus Sculpting Men With Athena/Minerva Bestowing Wisdom

Source: Kernyi (1997, pp. 1, 2) and Gayley (1893/1939, p. 9). Note: Detail from a sarcophagus in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, from the third century B.C.

Athens was based on her accepting that women would forego being citizens, give up their suffrage, and allow their children to be known by their fathers name (Monaghan, 1998, p. 60). Whatever the case, Marx, in reference to Athena and other female figures, certainly felt that the relations of the Goddesses in Olympus reflect an earlier period of a freer and more influential position of women (Marx, 1972, p. 121). Spretnak (1992) herself has written a book on the Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths. The Trickster and Rebel Who Brings Fire The intervention by Prometheus in upsetting Zeuss sacrificial feast in favor of mortals, and in bringing fire back to them for their hearths, is necessarily profoundly subversive of the patriarchal Olympian order, so he is also an archetype of the folktale trickster who delights in outwitting those who appear more powerful (Powell, 1998, p. 111). As Hesiod (c. eighth century B.C.), wanting to subtly tarnish the heroic stature of the Titan by emphasizing his lack of scruples, wrote about the sudden disappearance of fire from the early humans,
But Zeus concealed it, angered in his heart because Prometheus craftily deceived him: therefore he planned dire misery for mortals. He hid fire, but Ipetus brave

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son stole it again for mortals from wise Zeus the Thunderer, in a hollow fennel stalk. (Torrance, 1998, p. 286)

Prometheus was taken up as a personification of the Athenian opposition to servitude and arbitrary rule (Wood, 1988, pp. 141-144). This was especially true of the artisans and craft workers who were numerous enough to be influential in the popular assembly, despite the scorn of the higher classes (Meier, 1993, p. 385). It was his rebellion that set him apart from Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith, the source, in some accounts, of the fire that Prometheus stole. He had a higher status in Athens: He was worshipped at his own Temple of Hephaestus above the agora and celebrated in a festival, the Chalceia. Because he was a Pyrphorus (firebringer), he could symbolize artisans without the subversive aspect of Prometheus, just as Tityus later became a stand-in for the tortured Titan in Christian times. Even so, the Athenians possessed a cult of Prometheus, one associated with Hephaistos and celebrated in a torch race (Gantz, 1993, p. 160). One classical scholar, Michael Grant (1995), said, Yet although not worshipped by the Greeks, and without temples, Prometheus remained popular, the patron saint of the proletariat, handed down in folk-memory (p. 108). He is depicted on ancient Greek pottery (e.g., the calyx krater in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) sharing the fire from his long fennel stalk with a number of satyrs who ignite their own stalks from his (Stapleton, 1978, p. 183). This theme of the liberating torch carried back by the hero for the benefit of comrades reappeared later in the baroque eruption of the 17th century, as in a remarkably revolutionist painting of a full-bearded defiant Prometheus Carrying Fire (in the Museo del Prado, Madrid) executed for Peter Paul Rubens by his assistant Jan Crossiers in 1636 (Roberts et al., 1997, p. 24). The Culture Hero When the glowing coal in the hollow fennel stalk was seen as the source of all human arts and sciences, the appeal of Prometheus as a cultural hero became universal, no longer the mark of an underclass or political fraction. As such, the myth was susceptible to conservative as well as revolutionary interpretations. In Platos imaginative dialogues (Protagoras, Statesman, and Philebus) and in an epistle, the Titan symbolized the teachability of virtue, whereas his disciplining by Zeus showed the rule of law in human progress (Grant, 1995, pp. 185-186). As Michael Grant said, whereas Hesiod and particularly Plato believed that poets do not utter the words they do through art but by heavenly power, William Morris, on the other hand, felt it is a mere matter of craftsmanship (Grant, 1995, p. 92). In his Epistles (Letter II: 311b), Plato (1961) believed that wisdom and power were to be reconciled: With much the same idea, I believe primitive men brought together Prometheus and Zeus (p. 1564). In Platos Statesman (1961, 274c, d), he says that, without wisdom, early men were in direst straits: It was to meet this need that the gifts of the gods famous in ancient story were given, along with such teaching and instruction as was indispensable. . . . From these gifts everything has come which has furnished human life since the divine guardianship of men ceased (pp. 10391040). And in Protagoras (322a), he says a balance had now been struck between wisdom and power, leading to human language, the arts, and the growth of cities: Through this gift man had the means of life, but Prometheus, so the story says . . . had later to stand trial for theft (Plato, 1961, p. 319). For Plato, even the bearer of enlightenment must bear the punishment for rebellion.

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FIGURE 2: Prometheus (in center) Sharing Fire From Fennel Stalks With Satyrs Representing Artisans
Source: Kernyi (1997, pp. 8, 9). Note: Detail of the calyx krater in the Ashmolean Museum, from the fifth century B.C.

As a culture hero, Prometheus was widely taken to symbolize the divine origins of inspiration. But the idea of man as a tool-making animal is not intended. This definition, according to Lewis Mumford, would have seemed strange to Plato, who attributed mans rise from a primitive state as much to Maryas and Orpheus as to Prometheus and Hephaestos, the blacksmith (Mitcham & Mackey, 1983, pp. 77-78). Although Hesiod and particularly Plato believed that poets do not utter the words they do through art but by heavenly power, William Morris, on the other hand, felt it is a mere matter of craftsmanship (Grant, 1995, p. 92). Shakespeare (1973), in Loves Labour Lost, also looked on Promethean culture as creative inspiration. Never durst poet touch a pen to write Until his ink were tempred with Loves sighs; O, then his lines would ravish savage ears And plant in tyrants mild humility. From womens eyes this doctrine I derive: That sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain, and nourish all the world. (p. 91, Act IV, Scene iii, Line 350) The Tortured Visionary and the Liberated Hero The Aeschylus version in Prometheus Bound more closely fits the figure of an unbending will portrayed in later interpretations of the myth than does the Plato version of a negotiation between wisdom and power. In contrast with Platos tamed benefactor, or the sly comic figure modeled by Hesiod, or the quaint eccentric of Aristophaness The Birds, Aeschylus emphasized the decisive element of high tragedy, in which Prometheus is horrifically punished for his rebellion and love of

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humanity by being chained to a rock pillar in the Caucasus mountains and eaten daily by the bird of prey. This image of the sufferer attacked by the eagle of Zeus is found in an early krater or bowl with black and red figures from Laconia in the Peloponnese, portraying also his brother Atlas holding up the world (Pinsent, 1983, p. 59). It was said that the Athenian painter Parrhasius (fourth century B.C.) would have his model tortured so that the artist could truly depict the agony of Prometheus (Bruno, 1977, p. 38). The earliest archeological evidence of the Prometheus cycle is actually that of Prometheus about to be unbound, freed by Herakles/Hercules who shoots arrows at the eagle as it swoops toward its prey. There is such a painting on a Tyrrheniian amphora fragment dated at c. 600 B.C. to 550 B.C. that is in either the Museo Archeologico in Florence or the Staatliche Museum in Berlin (Aghion & Lissarrague, 1996, p. 247; picture in Kernyi, 1951, opposite p. 209). The 14th-century sources on classical mythology, such as De Genealogica Deorum by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) and allusions in the work of Dante Alighieri (1263-1321), helped to rekindle interest in classical themes. The punishment of Prometheus was the preferred subject in Renaissance painting after 1300 and baroque painting after 1600. Michaelangelo in 1532-1533 sketched a variant of the sufferer, inappropriately labeled as Tityus, chained to a mountain rock and attacked by the winged avenger of Zeus (Buonarroti, n.d., Figure 162). An 8 7 oil painting by Titian (in the Museo del Prado, Madrid), arguably based on Ovids Tityus (1549), shows the giant chained and upside down like Prometheus, flailing at the winged attacker (Titian, 1990, p. 285). In 1614, Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyder painted a virtual mirror image of Titians painting, one that depicted Prometheus Bound as a beardless, athletic man, struggling against his chains while the eagle attacks. The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Scribner, 1989, p. 23). It seems more than coincidence that Prometheus throughout the Renaissance is depicted upside down, as in the crucifixion of Peter. We are reminded that Prometheus still had religious significance 2,000 years after his birth in the rustic hillsides of Mount Caucusus or Panopeo. PROMETHEUS IN THE ROMANTIC ERA The rebel and the Titan chained to the rock by Zeus became a widespread symbol of estrangement and rebellion against authority in the century after the French revolution. As it is written in the Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, The nineteenth century romantic movement made Prometheus a symbol of freedom, a champion of mankind against tyranny; and to many, in different ages, he stood for the artist who receives from heaven the fire of creative inspiration (Hall, 1974, p. 254). In the nineteenth century, as an authoritative work says, Prometheus was seen as the great sacrifice dying for humanity as Gustave Moreau described him (Aghion & Lissarrague, 1996, p. 247). In romantic paintings, he became a dignified but determined young sufferer thinking of a new day, as in Gustave Moreaus 1868 The Torture of Prometheus (Flaum, 1993, p. 141), or writhing in utter agony, as in Moreaus 1869 Prometheus Struck by Lightning. Both paintings are in the Muse Gustave Moreau in Paris. As Shelleys poem was being published, the artist Henry Fuselis sketch of The Deliverance of Prometheus was being shown in the Royal Academy exhibition of June 1821. Anne K. Mellor (1989) points out that As both the creator and/or savior of man and the long-suffering rebel against tyranny, Prometheus was an often invoked self-

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image among the romantic poets (p. 77). She said, The figure of Prometheus connoted a radical democratic stance, a defiance of the existing monarchy and inegalitarian class system, and a recognition of the equal rights and freedoms of all individuals (p. 80). As Foster (1997b) points out, addressing environmentalist critics of Marx, Prometheus was the predominant cultural hero of the entire Romantic period (p. 150). The romantic dream of a regeneration is evident in Beethovens Overture to the ballet by Salvatore Vigano, The Creatures of Prometheus (Opus 43), which was first performed in Vienna on March 28, 1801. The theme was later used in the Eroica and other works. In the ballet, Prometheus, disappointed at the dull brutishness of his creatures, brings a couple at dawn to a field where he shows them freshly-picked flowers and fruits, and the creatures are tamed by the beauty of Nature (Cooper, 1991, p. 249). In 1850, Franz Liszt composed a symphonic poem titled Orpheus and Prometheus. Franz Schubert composed a song setting for Goethes poem Prometheus in 1819, as did Hugo Wolf in 1889. Much of the romantic focus on Prometheus was inspired by Goethe, but Sir Charles H. Parry composed a melodic song of Shelleys Prometheus Unbound. The young Wolfgang von Goethe, like many others, was struck by the rebellious image, writing his Prometheus in 1773, at the age of 25, and a dramatic fragment: Look down, O Zeus, Upon my world: it lives. I have shaped in my image, A race like unto me. To suffer, to weep, to enjoy and be glad, And like myself to have no regard for you. (Kernyi, 1997, p. 10) As one critic put it, George Gordon (Lord Byron) also wrote one splendid poem in which he addressed the Titan Prometheuscrucified on a remote mountain by an unjust godas a fellow sufferer (Byron, 1963, p. 145). On April 26, 1821, Byron wrote to Shelley, I have not yet got your Prometheus, which I long to see. I have heard nothing of mine, and do not know that it is yet published (Quennell, 1990, p. 602). His poem titled Prometheus concludes Thy godlike crime was to be kind. To render with thy precepts less the sum of human wretchedness, and strengthen Man with his own mind. But, baffled as thou wert from high, still, in thy patient energy. In the endurance and repulse of the impenetrable spirit Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, a mighty lesson we inherit. (Powell, 1998, pp. 116-117) More than 40 years later, Gerard Manley Hopkins freely translated Aeschyluss Prometheus Desmotes with similar intent.

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Divinity of air, fleet-feathered gales, Ye river-heads, thou billowy deep that laughst A countless laughter, Earth mother of all, Thou sun, allseeing eyeball of the day, Witness to me! Look you, I am a god, And these are from the gods my penalties. . . . Sith I lovd and lovd too well The race of man; and hence I fell. Woe is me, what do I hear? Fledgd things do rustle near; Whisper of the mid-air stirring And all that comes is fraught to me with fear. (Hopkins, 1998, pp. 6-7) Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her translation, Prometheus Bound and Other Poems, in 1833, and her Preface calls him one of the most original, and grand, and attaching characters ever conceived by the mind of man, and with Aeschylus, The striking nature of these, our first ideas of Prometheus, is not enfeebled by any subsequent ones (Browning, 1951, p. 139). Prometheus: I gave them also,fire. Chorus: And have they now, Those creatures of a day, the red-eyed fire? Prometheus: They have! And shall learn by it, many arts. (Browning, 1951, p. 145) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his Prometheus, or The Poets Forethought, emphasized both his prescience and revolutionism in his poem. Yet all bards, whose hearts unblighted Honor and believe the presage, Hold aloft their torches lighted, Gleaming through the realms benighted. As they onward bear the message! (Gayley, 1893/1939, p. 15) Samuel Taylor Coleridge talked of that earliest and most venerable mythus (or symbolic parable) of Prometheusthat truly wonderful fable, in which the characters of the rebellious spirit and of the divine friend of mankind ( ) are united in the same person (Jackson, 1985, p. 680). In an 1824 lecture to the Royal Society of Literature (published in 1835), on the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, Coleridge saw the fire in the fennel stalk as natures recognition of itself, as reason, in its creation of humankind: The substance, the stuff, is philosophy, the form only is poetry. The real message of Prometheus was that Nature, or Zeus, as the o can only come to a knowledge of herself in Man (Blunden, 1947, p. 252). The postmodern reading of the myth, as a vain glorification of the uncontrollable development of technology and the domination of the earth, has little precedence except for Mary Shelleys (1818) Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus, a complex classic of dystopian literature. The inspiration for it came after she had a dream stimulated by conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley about

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the experiments of Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin . . . who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things. (M. W. Shelley, 1965, p. x)

Anne K. Mellor (1989) argues that the novel is apparently directed against her husband and the men in his romantic circle, with their wide embrace of the Illuminati, alchemy, galvanism, the new organic chemistry, and evolutionism. Mellor also sees the novel as an allegory of the degradation of the French Revolution into the Terror. If so, and it seems extremely unlikely, this conservative inspiration for a Prometheus tale is exceptional among the romantics. The subtitle is meant to be ironic, of course, because the young scientist, Doctor Victor Frankenstein, believes he is giving the spark of life and knowledge to his creation. He is anything but Promethean in fleeing from the consequences of his act and despising his creation. In popular culture, the lonely and abandoned prodigy was given the name of the plasticator, much like the name of Prometheus has become symbolic of the monstrous tyranny of the modern mechanical age. Percy Bysshe Shelley, as Spretnak points out, in the next year wrote Prometheus Unbound (1819), in which the tyrant is overcome by a loving and environmentally caring Prometheus. The romantics never treated the myth as a simple, consensual paradigm or unambiguous archetype, despite their awareness that they were situated in an allegorical tradition. The Shelleys read and reread Francis Bacons (1992) Wisdom of the Ancients on Prometheus sive, Status hominis to understand the Aeschylus drama as a parable of human reason rather than as a fable as Hesiod reconstructed the story. While his poem was being published, Shelley heard Beethovens Overture to Prometheus performed on the London Apollonicon stage just before he left England (Blunden, 1947, p. 261). In her notes, Mary Shelley stressed her husbands portrayal of
Prometheus as the regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence, used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance, to that in which they are virtuous through wisdom. (P. B. Shelley, 1994, p. 295)

Prometheus is approached by the Earth, who says, I am the Earth, Thy mother, she within whose stony veins, To the last fibre of the loftiest tree Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air, Joy ran, as blood within a living frame, When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy! And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust, And our almighty Tyrant with fierce dread Grew pale, until his thunder chained thee here. (P. B. Shelley, 1901, p. 167) The conclusion of Prometheus Unbound is the reunification with his mate, Asia, or Nature, such that when the benefactor of mankind is liberated, Nature resumes the beauty of her prime (P. B. Shelley, 1994, p. 296).

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To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope til Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory. (P. B. Shelley, 1901, p. 206) There could scarcely be a more dynamic image of the romantic celebration of nature and freedom as intertwined, and Spretnaks grudging admission of the inclusion of the Earth Spirits, Panthea and other influences which, however, did not carry the day, only contributes to the misuse of this myth as a symbol of greedy, patriarchal exploitation of nature (Spretnak, 1997, p. 82). MARX AND SHELLEY Spretnaks (1997) statements that the Romantics dire pronouncements on industrialism did not get through to Marx and that Marx soon turned away from their deeply holistic analysis (p. 142) have no foundation in any biography of Marx and his family circle. The appreciation of Shelley, for instance, was a fixture of the movement from the earliest days: Excerpts from Shelley were read, Engels wrote to Marx from Barmen, at our third communist meeting in the towns largest hall on February 24, 1845 (Marx & Engels, 1982, p. 23). Franz Mehring (1969) wrote of Marxs lifelong love for poetry, drama, and novels and that after Marx had become permanently domiciled in London English literature took first place (p. 504). As Eleanor Marx recalled, Mohr would also read to his children, and although Shakespeare was the bible of our house, they also learned Scott, Byron, and Shelley, among many others. She recalled the Shelley enthusiasm of the English working class movement, the Chartists, and wrote,
I have heard my father and Engels again and again speak of this; and I have heard the same from many Chartists it has been my good fortune to know as a child and a young girl. . . . Only a few months ago, I heard Harney and Engels talking of the Chartist times, and of the Byron and especially Shelley-worship of the Chartists. (Kapp, 1976, p. 250)

And Eleanor Marx quoted Engels on his and Marxs early years in England: Oh, we all knew Shelley by heart then (Kapp, 1976, p. 250). Engels observed back then that Byron and Shelley are read almost exclusively by the lower classes; no respectable person would have the works of the latter on his desk without coming into the most terrible disrepute (Marx & Engels, 1976, p. 162). In fact, in 1887 the Shelley Society attempted to dissociate Shelley from the more radical free thinkers and the blatant and cruel socialism of the street (Tzuzuki, 1967, p. 171). Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling responded in 1888 with two lectures and a pamphlet on Shelleys Socialism. They pointed out the influence of William Godwin on Shelley becoming a socialist who condemned commercial morality and

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who welcomed a confrontation between the two great classes of society. In the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley took the opportunity of acknowledging that I have what a Scottish philosopher characteristically terms a passion for redeeming the world. . . . For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with [Rev. William] Paley and [Rev. Thomas] Malthus (P. B. Shelley, 1901, p. 164). Mary Shelley said He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable (Keach, 1997, p. 100). Marx, who knew and understood poets just as well as philosophers and economists, used to say . . . as Eleanor Marx recalled, that he joined with those who regret Shelleys death at the age of twenty-nine, because he was a revolutionary through and through and would consequently have stood with the vanguard of socialism (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 5, p. 162). Paul Foot, one of todays leading revolutionary socialists in England and the author of Red Shelley says that Shelleys poems, including his Song to the Men of England, are direct and deliberate appeals to the masses to rise up and trample their oppressors (Foot, 1984, p. 169). MARX AND AESCHYLUS Marx was familiar with the Promethean theme long before he read the English romantic poets. In the young Marx, at ages 18 and 19, we find a similar romantic exaltation of rebellion, combined with a Goethean scorn for the modern materialist age. Eleanor Marx said that her mothers father, Edgar von Westphalen, filled Marx with enthusiasm for the romantic school (McLellan, 1973, p. 15). His poetic allusions are virtually all to Greek mythology and drama. In his Book of Songs (1836) for Jenny, the teenager sees the power of passionate song and poetry in defying divinity. Earths envious Gods have scanned before Human fire with gaze profound; And forever must the Earthling poor Mate his bosoms glow with sound. For, if passion leaped up, vibrant, bold, In the Souls sweet radiance, Daringly it would your worlds enfold, Would dethrone you, would bring you down low, Would outsoar the Zephyr-dance. Ripe a world above you then would grow. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 1, p. 521) And in an unfinished verse tragedy, the character Oulanem combines defiance with an ironic derision of philistine and soulless images of humanity. Bound in eternal fear, splintered and void, Bound, bound forever, and forever bound! The worlds, they see it and go rolling on And howl the burial song of their own death. And we, we [are] Apes of a cold God. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 1, p. 600) Marxs irony here (often missed by critics) is assuredly not a defense of religion but a romanticist criticism of the emptiness of the modern perspective on life. Oulanem cries out

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Soon I shall clasp Eternity and howl Humanitys giant curse into its ear. Eternity! It is eternal pain, Death inconceivable, immeasurable! An evil artifice contrived to taunt us, Who are but clockwork, blind machines wound up To be the calendar-fools of Time. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 1, p. 499) These dire images of humans in modern society, as captive, shivering apes or as unseeing clockwork automatons, were by no means unique in 19th-century romanticism. In his doctoral dissertation in 1841, Marx invoked Prometheus again in his defense against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 1, p. 30). His reference is to the play by Aeschylus, and Paul Lafargue (1972) said of Marx in later life, Every year he read Aeschylus in the Greek original (p. 25). In Prometheus Bound, as the 23-year-old Marx put it in his dissertation, Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus: In simple words, I hate the pack of gods (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 1, p. 30). He quoted Aeschylus in Greek: Be sure of this, I would not change my state Of evil fortune for your servitude. Better to be the servant of this rock Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 1, p. 30) For Marx, in his dissertation, Prometheus was a symbol of Enlightenment (the bringer of light to humanity in defiance of the Olympian gods and religion), a mythological figure to be compared to Epricurus, the great enlightener within ancient philosophy. Prometheus (together with Epicurus) symbolized the triumph over religious alienation and the rise of materialist views. Although ancient materialism was primarily mechanistic in nature, and thus one-sided and limited, Marx was soon to develop his own practical materialism through the critical appropriation of Feurbachian materialism. He saw the estrangement of human sensuous relations, of the material conditions of human existence, as arising from social relations implicit in the production of the commodity and thus open to worldly transformation. Before Marx, there was no social theory that explicated that process, and his practical-critical or materialist conception could only be developed through a rigorous social and philosophic critique of the existing political economy. In communicating his ideas, he often used allusions to great literature, as in the remarks on money in Shakespeares Timon of Athens. Marxs internalizing of both the style and content of literature in several languages is integral to that critique. Special recognition was given to the English romantic poets who not only opposed the new bourgeois order but also the past oppression by the landed aristocracy. Spretnak (1997), in The Resurgence of the Real, was simply wrong in saying that Marx soon turned away from their [the Romantics] deeply holistic analysis of alienation . . . to the more narrow confines of economism (p. 142). No turn was called for. As the historian Christopher Hill said, Almost all these poets at one time or another were revolutionaries but they are known as romantics because their poetry has been filletedthe politics taken out and nature left in (Foot, 1992, p. 132).

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There are few symbols less appropriate for the domination of the human and natural world by the Invisible Hand of Homo Economicus than the rebel Prometheus. Even Spretnaks acknowledged source contrasts the Promethean biological and metaphysical rebel with the Saturnian social systems that contain and repress this spirit (Tarnas, 1991, p. 493f). What may attract Spretnak to a misconceived view of the Titan as symbolizing repression and domination is probably that after several decades of cold war scholarship, Prometheus has been widely identified with Marx and the Marxist version of economism (Spretnak, 1997, p. 134). THE COMMUNISM OF JOHN RUSKIN AND OF WILLIAM MORRIS One of the secondary themes of Spretnaks (1997) The Resurgence of the Realoverlapping with the whole question of Prometheanismis to also challenge twentieth-century modernitys appropriation of some of its most outstanding critics, namely John Ruskin and William Morris (p. 7). In this context, modernity seems to refer largely to Marxism. Spretnak, however, is willing to see the often-linked pair embraced by the top leadership of that most modernist model of meliorism: the British Labour Party. Leaders of the Labour Party liked to say that the works of Ruskin [1819-1900] and Morris [1834-1896] had been more important to their founding than those of Marx [1818-1883] (Spretnak, 1997, p. 149). The relationship of Morris and Ruskin, however, is more complex than she assumes, and their political legacy is not so simple. As to the political effect of Ruskins social criticism, Philip Henderson (1967) said, In fact, the moral impetus of Ruskins Unto this Last [1860] had more influence in creating the British Labour movement than perhaps anything else (p. 242). A biographer of Ruskin, Joan Abse (1980), said that, The Fabians . . . pursuing notions of social efficiency rather than human fulfillment, owed little to him, but socialists like the founder members of the Independent Labour Party, Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, F. W. Jewett, were touched by his thought and quoted him often in their speeches. She said, Though Ruskin shied away from the label of socialism, which had deservedly been pinned on these essays, he did cheerfully acknowledge that his ideas would shorten the days of capital and wealth (pp. 181, 231). Morris (1993) also hailed Ruskins booklet, which has had the most enduring and beneficent effect on his contemporaries, and will have through them on succeeding generations (p. 369). As to Morris himself, Raymond Williams (1958) agrees that he is often mentioned by modern members of the Labour Party, but usually in terms that suggest a very limited acquaintance with his actual ideas (p. 156). And in fact, as E. P. Thompson (1976) pointed out, Morris in his later life often criticized what he called the utilitarian sham socialism (p. 107) that was incorporated into the Fabian Society, the main rival to Marxian proletarian socialism, and later into the leadership of the British Labour Party. From his experience with the Fabians, who would later bestow their blessings on Stalins iron-fisted bureaucracy in the 1930s, Morris (1973) predicted,
I think it quite probable that in the early days of Socialism the reflex of the terror of starvation, which so oppresses us now, would drive us into excesses of utilitarianism. Indeed, there is a school of Socialists now extant who worship utilitarianism with a fervour of fatuity which is perhaps a natural consequence of their assump-

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tion of practicality. So that it is not unlikely that the public opinion of a community would be in favour of cutting down all the timber in England, and turning the country into a big Bonanza farm or a market-garden under glass. (pp. 212-213)

But Morris saw that there was also an opposite danger, a reverence for the precapitalist feudal system. Ruskin was 24 years younger than Thomas Carlyle (17951881), who was a major influence on the young Ruskin. Engels commented on Carlyles works on the French Revolution, Cromwell, and the Chartist movement: In all these writings, the critique of the present is bound up with a strangely unhistorical apotheosis of the Middle Ages, which is a frequent characteristic of English revolutionaries (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 5, p. 327). This was certainly true of some of the romantic poets. Arthur Herman points out, for instance, that Robert Southey contrasted the new era of materialism and greed with an earlier England, when the benevolent squire called his tenants around the crackling fire and everyone shared in the benefits according to his station (Herman, 1997, pp. 41-42). Marx commented on Carlyle and Adam Mller that
it is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end. (Marx, 1973, p. 162)

As early as November 1844, in reviewing a novel, Marx wrote of the protagonist, This great lord is like the members of Young England, who also wish to reform the world . . . playing the role of Providence and arranging the world according to his own ideas (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 4, p. 205). It was the same old muck of top-down reform that promised not to disturb the hierarchical system of social classes. Marx pointed out that the first reaction against the French Revolution and the Enlightenment which is connected with it was naturally to regard everything medieval as romantic. . . . The second reaction is to look beyond the Middle Ages into the primitive age of every nation, and that corresponds to the socialist trend, by which he meant research into tribal and communal lands (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 42, p. 357; Marx & Engels, 1976, p. 286). At the time, many regarded Ruskin as a socialist, especially after his 1857 lectures on The Political Economy of Art and his critique of utilitarian economics, Unto This Last, published in book form in 1862. After the rising of the Paris Commune in 1871, he did move rhetorically closer to proletarian socialism, shocking the readers of Fors Clavigera (July 21, 1871) by declaring that I am a Communist of the old schoolreddest also of the red (Ruskin, 1997, p. 294). But by this, Ruskin meant the Commune of Thomas More, whose vision he mistranslated as the Place of Wellbeing or Utopia, and he contrasted that Eutopian Communism with the Parisian notion of Communism, while disclaiming any real knowledge of this new school (Ruskin, 1997, p. 294). However, on July 1, 1871, Ruskin wrote,
And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitaliststhat is to say, people who live by percentages on the labour of others; instead of by fair wages for their own. The real war in Europe, of which this fighting in Paris is the inauguration, is between these and the workman, such as those have made him. (Abse, 1980, p. 238; Ruskin, 1997, p. 302)

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Ruskin does not seem to have read Marx or Engels, but he was aware of the political role of the Marx party in Paris and London, even worrying in Fors Clavigera (October 1872) that his terms may sound very radical and International, referring to the International Workers Association, whose General Secretary in the London headquarters was, of course, Karl Marx (K. Clark, 1964, p. 268n). According to a recent writer, Morris read with great eagerness all that Ruskin wrote, at least up to Fors Clavigera: after that, perhaps he troubled less not only about what Ruskin might say about art . . . but about society too (Watkinson, 1990, p. 101). But Ruskin was torn between a vision of a socialist future and a romantic medieval past inspired by Scott, Disraeli, and Carlyle. As he wrote to a friend in March 1886, Of course I am a Socialist of the most stern sortbut I am also a Tory of the sternest sort (Abse, 1980, p. 235). Ruskins only activism on behalf of the future Place of Wellbeing was the founding of the St. Georges Guild, which intended to subscribe landowners and factory owners who promised to care for their hands, but which succeeded only in building a small workmens library and art museum by 1875. No Lords of Land or Capital stepped forward to endow the Guild. The impracticality of Ruskins philanthropic utopianism would soon be clear to William Morris. Ruskin was in the chair moderating on November 14, 1883, when Morris delivered his famous red lecture at Oxford on Art under Plutocracy, publicly announcing, I am one of the people called socialists (Morris, 1973, p. 66). However, when Morris then asked him to join the Democratic Federation (the English grouping allied with Marx), Ruskin declined (McCarthy, 1995, p. 477). The shock of Morris espousing socialism at Oxford, in what was a fully informed affirmation and not merely a rhetorical jolt as was Ruskins, was compounded when he was arrested on September 20, 1885, in a free speech demonstration, prompting the writer George Gissing to groan, It is painful to me beyond expression. Why cannot he write poetry in the shade? (Mahamdalie, 1996, p. 79). Morris eventually (in 1889) distanced himself from The pessimistic revolt of the latter end of this century led by John Ruskin against the philistinism of the triumphant bourgeois, halting and stumbling as it necessarily was (Morris, 1993, p. 355). Morris later said of Ruskin (in 1894) that The latter, before my days of practical socialism, was my master towards the ideal (Morris, 1993, p. 381). The emphasis was on the past tense, and the term practical was meant to distinguish his new position from those utopians and moral critics who had no idea of how their visions were to be realized. Spretnak maintains that Morris incorporates most of the Tories Young England movement of the 1840s (Spretnak, 1997, p. 152). Yet, he especially criticized the Tory romantics, or as Marx and Engels called them in the 1848 Manifesto Feudal Socialists (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 6, pp. 507-508). Morris blistered them for their reactionary plans for importing the conditions of the production and life of the Middle Ages (wholly misunderstood by them, by the way) into the present system of the capitalist farmer, the great industries, and the universal worldmarket (Morris, 1993, p. 325). The appraisals of Marx and Morris are widely shared today by mainstream historians, one of whom says the Young England movement had looked back to an idealized patriarchal rural England in which paternalistic landlords had earned the faithful service of devoted farmers and servants and only the money-grubbing middle-class merchants or industrialists played the role of villains (Arnstein, 1988, p. 117).

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WILLIAM MORRIS: FROM REVOLUTIONIST TO ROMANTIC? Spretnak confronts Morris through the literary conceit of compelling Morris to travel once again through time to a new millennium (this time to 2024 instead of 2102 A.D.). Then she is the first to meet him and act as guide to the newly greened world undertaken by President Albert Gore just one score and 4 years ago. Apparently unaware of the voluminous literature on Marx and socialist ecology, or even of his famous envisioning of a transcendence of the urban and rural antagonism, Spretnak says that the vision of William Morris could hardly have been further removed from the industrial dreams of scientific Marxism (Spretnak, 1997, p. 152). Spretnak says this even though the biography she relies on quotes Morris as saying that, from 1883 onward, he had studied socialism from the scientific point of view (McCarthy, 1995, p. 476). Her imaginary goal is frankly to convince Morris that the Marxist vision of scientific socialism was practically the opposite of what you had in mind. She succeeds, in her estimation, leaving Morris to pace back and forth, muttering things I could barely make out (Spretnak, 1997, p. 190). No wonder she had difficulty understanding the seasoned time traveler, who had wrestled with the issue of revolutionary violence since being won over to the Marx party in early 1883, just as Marx was exiting. On March 6, 1883 (a week before Marx died), Morris gave a lecture saying that the change (the revolution) should be made gradually and peaceably to prevent its coming with violence and injustice and how good it were to destroy all that must be destroyed gradually and with good grace (Henderson, 1967, p. 250). In a letter dated September 13, 1886, Frederick Engels was very critical, writing that Morris is a settled sentimental Socialist (Engels, 1959, p. 370). But in fact he was already in transition, as E. P. Thompsons (1977) title expressed it, From Romantic to Revolutionary. On June 14, 1885, Morris gave a now-famous speech on The Hopes of Civilization (first published in 1888), denouncing reformers who nevertheless shudder back from the class struggle and think that peace is not only possible, but natural (Morris, 1993, p. 325). Morris (1993) said, To Germany we owe the school of economists, at whose head stands the name of Karl Marx, who have made modern socialism what it is: the earlier Socialist writers and preachers based their hopes on man being taught to see the desirableness of cooperation (Morris, 1993, p. 323). Morris declared, I thoroughly enjoyed the historical part of Capital (p. 380), and it is clear that he reproduced that historical conception in News From Nowhere in 1890 and in his later lectures and other writings. Through that history, Morris came to a different view of top-down utopians and redeemers, insisting on what he called Socialism from the Root Up in articles republished in 1893 as Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (McCarthy, 1995, p. 507). Morris devoured Le Capital in the French translation in the 1880s (an English translation only appeared in 1887) and wanted to learn German to read it and other works in the original. He said, I feel myself very weak as to the science of Socialism on many points: I wish I knew German, as I see I must certainly learn it (McCarthy, 1995, p. 476). Four years later, he wrote, I am glad of the opportunity this gives me of hammering some Marx into myself (McCarthy, 1995, p. 507). As an associate remarked, by 1884 his copy of Le Capital had been worn to loose sections by his own constant study of it (McCarthy, 1995, p. 592). A biographer said he then bound the book in deep turquoise leather with elaborate gilt-tooled designs.

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SOCIAL CHANGE AND CONFLICT Spretnak has Morris disavow extreme leftists for whom, as Morris is fictively quoted, violence itself becomes more dear than the cause (Spretnak, 1997, p. 208). After Morris formed the Socialist League, he came to oppose both pacifism and the anarchist propaganda of the deed. Prompted by the epidemic of anarchist bomb throwing, Morris said in an interview in the Justice of January 27, 1895, that it was simply a social disease caused by the evil conditions of society. . . . Of course, as a Socialist I regard the anarchists . . . as being diametrically opposed to us (Henderson, 1967, p. 350). Morris was in complete agreement with Marx, who had often denounced what he called the alchemists of the revolution.
It is precisely their business to anticipate the process of revolutionary development, to bring it artificially to crisis-point, to launch a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a revolution. For them the only condition for revolution is the adequate preparation of their conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution and are characterized by exactly the same chaotic thinking and blinkered obsessions as the alchemists of old. They leap at inventions which are supposed to work revolutionary miracles: incendiary bombs, destructive devices of magic effect, revolts which are expected to be all the more miraculous and astonishing in effect as their basis is less rational. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 10, p. 318)

The Spretnak of the fictional dream tells the founder of the Socialist League and its organ, The Commonweal: Exponent of International Revolutionary Socialism, that the shift in the political economy was achieved almost entirely through nonviolent campaigns in scores of countries (Spretnak, 1997, p. 208). In this regard, Spretnaks route to Utopia is the same as Edward Bellamys, whose Looking Backward also, as the real Morris said in his review of this popular book in June 1889, described the great change having peaceably and fatalistically taken place (Morris, 1993, p. 356). I call myself a Communist, Morris told readers of The Commonweal (May 5, 1889) in distinction from both Anarchism and State Socialism (Morris, 1973, p. 210). The first rejected all authority as coercive, but Morris (1973) argued that to prevent individuals from coercing others, there must be a collective authority.
For the rest . . . I neither believe in State Socialism as desirable in itself, or, indeed, as a complete scheme do I think it possible. Nevertheless, some approach to it is sure to be tried, and in my mind this will precede any complete enlightenment on the new order of things. The success of Mr. Bellamys Utopian book, deadly dull as it is, is a straw to show which way the wind blows. (Morris, 1973, p. 225)

Morris (1993) sensed that because of the popularity of Looking Backward, it was sure to be quoted as an authority for what Socialists believe (p. 358). Bellamy (1968) wrote, Since the nation is the sole employer, the government must fix the rate of wages and determine just how much everybody shall earn, from doctors to the diggers (p. 79). So, Morris (1993) said, it is necessary to point out that there are socialists who do not think that the problem of the organization of life and necessary labour can be dealt with by a huge national centralization . . . for which no one feels himself responsible. Instead, he wrote, it will be necessary for the unit of administration to be small enough for every citizen to feel himself responsible for its details (p. 358).

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In opposition to Edward Bellamys scheme of Nationalization, based on the conscription of workers and the insatiable accumulation of commodities, Morris (1993) argued that the only incentive to labour is and must be pleasure in the work itself. Individuals cannot shuffle off this business of life on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State, but must deal with it in conscious association with each other (pp. 357-358). To a friend, Morris wrote, Thanks, I wouldnt care to live in such a cockney paradise as he imagines, and his daughter, May Morris, recalled his saying that, if they brigaded him into a regiment of workers he would just lie on his back and kick (McCarthy, 1995, p. 584). Because Morriss News From Nowhere (serialized in Commonweal from January 11 to October 4, 1890) was a direct confrontation with Bellamy, it naturally included a chapter on How the Change Came, and the politics of the story only become clear in that context (Crump, 1990, pp. 57-73). Morris had been very deeply affected as a participant in the November 13, 1887, Bloody Sunday Battle of Trafalgar Square, and he incorporated it into his tale as a signal event of the Revolution of 1952 A.D., in which, according to the novel, up to a couple of thousand demonstrators were mowed down by army machine guns. When William Guest asks his host, Did the change, the revolution it used to be called, come peacefully? he is told, It was war from beginning to end (Morris, 1993, p. 133). But one turning point was that the soldiers were so daunted by the slaughter which they had made, that they . . . shrank back from the dreadful courage necessary for carrying out another massacre (Morris, 1993, p. 150). Nevertheless, the ensuing civil war lasted for 2 years, with heroic sacrifices by the working class until the greater part . . . of the soldiers joined the side of the people. The host adds that I much doubt whether, without this seemingly dreadful civil war, the due talent for administration would have been developed amongst the working men (Morris, 1993, pp. 155-156). It almost seems that Morris was emphasizing Marxs conception, most concisely expressed in the 1844 Theses on Feuerbach (first published in German by Engels as an appendix to his own booklet on Feuerbach issued by the publisher Dietz in May 1888). Marx wrote that the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice [praxis] (Engels, 1941, p. 83; Marx, 1977, p. 156). In 1850, during a confrontation with followers of the conspirator Auguste Blanqui, Marx admonished them:
While we say to workers: You have to endure and go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil war in order to change the circumstances, in order to make yourselves fit for powerinstead of that, you say: We must come to power immediately, or otherwise we may as well go to sleep. (Avineri, 1971, p. 195)

Whether Morris came to a similar view on his own or learned it from another, it shows the extent to which he was motivated by the same conception of workingclass practical-critical socialism as Marx. When Morris (1973) echoed Marxs complaint about the workers, it was simply realism, not cynicism: They do not believe in their own capacity to undertake the management of affairs, and to be responsible for their life in this world (p. 226). Morris would never give up that imperative, and in January 1893, in response to those who, like Spretnak today, wished that he would go-beyond-the-left, stated bluntly, I have not changed my mind about socialism (Mahamdallie, 1996, p. 94).

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In her dream, Spretnak (1997) patiently explained to Morris that workers had not played much of a role in the change of 2000 A.D. because organized labor . . . had gotten weak, and after the threat of communism finally disappeared, by the 1990s, workers really got squeezed (p. 190). The determinant factor that year was that the Greens were doing so well in the polls the month before the election that the Democrats finally admitted they couldnt beat the Republican-Reform coalition unless they linked up (Spretnak, 1997, p. 193). Thus, the postmodern equivalent of Bloody Sunday in snowballing the movement was the big day that this was announced on television, with the whole world watching: Ill never forget that press conference in October 2000. There stood Al Gore (a defender of the environmentand even ecospiritualitywhod lost his voice on those matters for eight years). Flanking the contrite Presidential hopeful were six members of his future cabinet, ranging from Ralph Nader as Attorney General to Paul Hawken as Secretary of Commerce: And that team won (Spretnak, 1997, p. 193). Not a utopia, grantedbut tremendous strides were made, Spretnak told the curious revolutionist, who had spurned electoralism as a strategy for turning the world right side up (Spretnak, 1997, p. 193). As to social ownership of the means of production, so important to Morris and all others who identified socialism with genuine democracy, Spretnak had earlier expressed her view that future reforms should be in keeping with Green principles of private ownership and cooperative economics (Spretnak, 1986, p. 65). Apparently, social ownership with workers control was not even considered an option by those believing that the economy should neither be owned by the state nor controlled by huge corporations (Spretnak, 1997, p. 106). DEMOCRATIC PLANNING: APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY VERSUS MEGATECHNOLOGY In her study of the West German Greens in 1982-1984, titled Green Politics and coauthored with Fritjof Capra, Spretnak had explained that among the more complicated dynamics within the Green party is the role of the left (Spretnak & Capra, 1986, p. 21). Part of the controversy revolved around one of the four pillars of die Grnen, that of social responsibility. Spretnak and Capra observed that the radical-left Greens . . . read sozial as a codeword for socialism, that is democratic Marxism (Spretnak & Capra, 1986, p. 35). In opposition to such tendencies, the postmodern ecological approach, exemplified by Spretnak and Capra, was to throw doubt on the virtues of planning and use of industrial technology to promote ecological (and social) ends. To that part of the movement that had tended to see technology itself as the totality of disaster, it my have made sense to argue, as Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, put it, that you cant have a planned society without the necessary technological base (Kaczynski, 1996, 214). Inextricably related, both would need to be opposed, and opposition to the latter might constitute still another way of opposing the former. Since the publishing of Spretnak and Capras Green Politics, however, the issue has become somewhat more defined, and some leading figures have rejected the Luddite position. As Theodore Roszak observed, distinguishing himself from some of the other participants in a Foundation for Deep Ecology roundtable conference on Megatechnology, There has never been a movement that called all technology evil and demanded its repeal in favor of reverting to finger-

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nails and incisors (Mills, 1997, p. vii). Roszak went on to say, In confronting that monster [megatechnology] some of my fellow Neo-Luddites can be sweeping in their prescription for technology withdrawal. Perhaps they are right in their absolutism (Mills, 1997, p. ix). Fritjof Capra would not concede that the absolute condemnation of technology made sense.
As we were going around there was an implication that we were categorically against technology. This statement is either a sloppy way of speaking or it is hypocritical. I dont think that we can maintain that we are against technology. (Mills, 1997, p. 38)

Capra was, however, far from clear in distinguishing which technologies were unacceptable and which were to be saved or what criterion was to be used in those judgments.
We can and must say that we are critical of all technology today, but we are not against technology categorically. Some technologies may not be saved; we can say we are against them and then articulate our criticisms of the totalitarian aspect, the industrial aspect, and so on. (Mills, 1997, p. 38)

Jeremy Rifkin obliquely raised the question of social and political power over technological decisions.
Perhaps, the most appropriate question should be, How much power is expropriated by a given technology? Are there technologies so inherently powerful that in utilizing them we undo our relationship to the scale of things, to our needs, the needs of the biosphere and of future generations? (Mills, 1997, pp. 43-44)

But Rifkin did not address the question of who is to make those judgments about the key issues of technology: the power and scale of such things, their relevance to the needs of our children and our posterity, and of course the ecological requirements. WHO ENLIGHTENS THE ENLIGHTENERS? It is the old question, famously asked by a Roman poet of satire, Decimus Junius Juvenal, who lived from about 60 to 140 A.D.: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? In the words of Marx in 1842, If we all remain in swaddling clothes, who is to wrap us in them? If we all remain in the cradle, who is to rock us? If we are all prisoners, who is to be the prison warder? (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 1, p. 155). Literally, who has custody of the custodians? For Marx, this was the quandary of the top-down utopianism that had sprung up on the heels of Anglo-French scientific materialism. In 1844, Marx took notice of the circularity of the Enlightenment view that mans character was formed for him by his social environment, a view stunningly expressed by Claude-Adrian Helvetius in De lEsprit, published in 1758.
As, according to Helvetius, it is education, by which he means . . . not only education in the ordinary sense but the totality of the individuals conditions of life, which forms man, if a reform is necessary to abolish the contradiction between particular interests and that of society, so, on the other hand, a transformation of consciousness is necessary to carry out such a reform. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 4, p. 133)

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There was an implicit dilemma in the eudaemonic fusing of Lockean and Cartesian sensationalism with Philosophe rationalism and Economiste utilitarian selfinterest. The first line stressed the determinism of material circumstances, whereas the latter championed an ideology that could ex nihilo create a harmony of egos by abolishing ignorance (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 4, p. 133). Could those lines converge? In 1845, applying Juvenals query to Helvetius directly, but also generally to Enlightenment reforms and early socialist schemes (particularly that of Robert Owen), Marx wrote,
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men, and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 5, p. 4)

It was primarily this often explicit elitism, which positioned the reformers at the commanding heights of society, that repelled Marx from the utopians, and when Engels, in 1888, edited these notes he added parenthetically, in Robert Owen [1771-1858], for example (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 5, p. 7). To accomplish the change, the modern utopian reformers (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and Cabet) appealed, Marx said, by preference to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it, as Marx said in Panglossian tones, the best possible plan of the best possible state of society? (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 6, p. 515; McLellan, 1977, p. 244). Robert Owen, whose Helvetian learning theory came from William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham, believed that this great change . . . must and will be accomplished by the rich and powerful. There are no other parties to do it. . . . It is a waste of time, talent and pecuniary means for the poor to contend in opposition to the rich and powerful (Draper, 1996, p. 10). Despite his later sympathy with workers, the custodians of New Lanark (1813) would apply proper means, which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men, such as himself and Jeremy Bentham (Geoghegan, 1987, p. 14). Godwin and Shelley took a more libertarian view of socialism, but, as a biographer said, it was the Owenite version which was to become the future orthodoxy (St. Clair, 1989, p. 350). Owen said openly that the aim of his philanthropic utopianism was to govern or treat all society as the most advanced physicians govern and treat their patients in the best arranged lunatic hospitals (Draper, 1996, p. 10). It was no surprise, as the Communist Manifesto noted, that the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, respectively oppose the Chartists and the Rformistes (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 6, p. 517). The refrain of the utopians to these workers was, Marx said, So no combination! No politics. As Marx wrote, The [utopian] socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 6, p. 210). Marx conceded that the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, [but] their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 6, p. 516). Marx, in 1877, worried that Utopian socialism, the play of the imagination on the future structure of societyis once again rampant (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 4, p. 284). Watching the decline of the utopian redeemers, Marx could be extremely caustic in debates, reportedly saying, To call to the workers without any strictly scientific ideas or constructive doc-

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trines . . . was equivalent to vain dishonest play at preaching, which assumed on one side an inspired prophet and on the other only gaping asses (McLellan, 1973, pp. 156-157). HOMO FABER In 1845, Marx had criticized the Saint-Simonians, forerunners of positivist order and progress, technocracy and futurism, for their being in thrall to the wonders of modern technology.
The Saint-Simon school glorified in dithyrambs the productive power of industry. The forces which industry calls into being it lumped together with industry itself, that is to say, with the present-day conditions of existence that industry gives to these forces. . . . In the course of the struggle the contradiction of the two forces which they had confused became manifest. Their glorification of industry (of the productive forces of industry) became a glorification of the bourgeoisie. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 4, pp. 282-283)

The economists reduction of actual humankind to the abstraction of Homo Faber or Homo Economicus occluded the reality of stratification in the division of labor, just as Aristotles idea of Zoon Politikon (or Homo Politicus in later terminology) implicitly excluded Greek tillers and herd-tenders from humanity. Marx had noted, The real meaning of Aristotles definition is that man is by nature citizen of a town. This is quite as characteristic of classical antiquity as Franklins definition of man as a tool-making animal is characteristic of Yankeedom (Marx, 1976, p. 444). The tendency to identify the current period as modern, and therefore superior to the past, was seen in the medias appraisal of Modern art etc., Marx thought, with no consideration of the uneven development of material production relative to e.g. artistic development. In general, the concept of progress . . . [is] not to be conceived in the usual abstractness (Marx, 1973, p. 109). On occasion, he even sounded like Ruskin and Morris. In defending freedom of the press in 1842, he commented ironically on the draconian censorship on newspapers and journals, in contrast to the relative tolerance of hefty tomes.
Our time does not possess that real sense for greatness that we so admire in the Middle Ages. Look at the paltry, pietistic little tracts, look at our philosophical systems in small octavos, and then turn your gaze to the twenty gigantic folios of Duns Scotus. You dont have to read the books; the adventurous look of them touches your heart, strikes your senses like some Gothic building. (Marx, 1974, p. 5)

The identification of human ingenuity with the regime of capital was often used to legitimize the existing social relations. The economists ascribe a false importance to the material factors of labour compared with labour itself in order to have also a technological justification for the specific social form, i.e., the capitalist form (Marx, 1971, p. 276). Whatever the orientation, one views production as a purely technological process, disregarding the social forms of production (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 30, p. 149). For some critics of technology, the result is a misplaced fear of change itself, Where every new invention, Marx commented, makes people regret that it does not complete the sum total of inventions (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 5, p. 303).

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Marx, likewise, rejected the shimmering fantasy of Cornucopia, which promised to raise the workers to the dignity of rational consumers, so that they make a market for the things showered on them by civilization and the progress of invention (Marx, 1978, p. 592). Rather than civilization and progress, Marx preferred the term industrial revolution, and he underscored the effect on the producers: The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution, replaces the worker, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools and set in power by a single motive force (Marx, 1976, p. 497). In Marxs view,
All the progress of civilization . . . if you like, in the productive powers of labour itselfsuch as results from science, inventions, division and combination of labour, improved means of communication, creation of a world market, machinery etc.enriches not the worker but rather capital; hence it only magnifies again the power dominating over labour. (Marx, 1973, p. 308)

Workers do not enter freely into association but are ruled by involuntary combination and so are subservient to and led by an alien will and an alien intelligencehaving its animating unity elsewhereas its material unity appears subordinate to the objective unity of the machinery, of fixed capital, which, as the animated monster, objectifies the scientific idea (Marx, 1973, p. 470). The image of the animated monster is almost certainly inspired by Frankenstein, to which Marx referred in a letter of December 27, 1863 (Marx, 1979, p. 176; Marx & Engels, 1975, p. 503). Here we can see Marx alluding to and appropriating Mary Shelleys personification of science gone monstrously wrong through Victors experiment bestowing animation upon lifeless matter (M. W. Shelley, 1965, p. 51). RECONSTRUCTING TECHNOLOGY ON A NEW BASIS If the animated monster is a threat, the only certain resolution would seem to be to destroy it, and this was the first response of workers.
Hence the character of independence from and estrangement towards the worker, which the capitalist mode of production gives to the conditions of labour and the product of labour, develops into a complete and total antagonism with the advent of machinery. It is therefore when machinery arrives on the scene that the worker for the first time revolts savagely against the instruments of labour. (Marx, 1976, pp. 558-559)

There seemed to the workers no prospect of collectively controlling machinery and its effects.
All this conflicts with, for example, the antiquated view of earlier modes of production according to which the city authorities would, for instance, prohibit inventions so as not to deprive workers of their livelihood. In such a society the worker was an end in himself. (Marx, 1976, p. 1050)

In focusing on the resistance to the factory system, Marx had in mind the socalled machine wreckers or Luddites.

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The large-scale destruction of machinery which occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the employment of the power loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin government . . . a pretext for the most violent and reactionary measures. It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments. (Marx, 1976, pp. 554-555; also see Sale, 1995, p. 195)

Under capitalism, technology estranges the worker from his own activity, and this estrangement grows with the advance of productive machinery.
Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the machine, and his own labour devalued thereby. Hence the workers struggle against machinery. What was the living workers activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form: capital absorbs labour into itselfas though its body were by love possessed. (Marx, 1973, p. 704)

Marx quotes from Goethes Faust (part 1, act 5), Alls htte sie Lieb im Leibe (Goethe, n.d., p. 60). This is the refrain when the rat in Auerbachs cellar is poisoned by the cook, and leapt and winced as creatures do, when love consumes their vitals (Wayne, 1958, p. 102). Again, Marx is emphasizing (with an image of Promethean suffering) the agony and powerlessness of workers confronted by the mechanized factory system. Marx hailed the revolutionary ferment of the machine wreckers, but he stressed that the estrangement of labor would only be ended by the rupture opened up by new unparalleled productivity within the chains of private property and profit. Only on the basis of this contradiction could class struggle reach the point of revolutionizing society, scaling down the division of labor and reconstructing the infrastructure of a postcapitalist society.
There is also no doubt that these revolutionary ferments whose goal is the abolition of the old division of labour stand in diametrical contradiction with the capitalist form of production, and the economic situation of the workers, which corresponds to that form. However, the development of the contradictions of a given historical form of production is the only historical way in which it can be dissolved and then reconstructed on a new basis. (Marx, 1976, p. 619)

There is a dialectic of the forces and relations of production that simply cannot be ignored; the lever to overturn that system must be found in the here and now, in the real, neither in nostalgia for the past nor millennial dreams of the future. Marx clearly did not regard technology as a neutral factor in the estrangement of labor, but he believed that, until such time as technology can be reconstructed on a new basis, the focus had to be on workerscontrol. As to Carlyle, Disraeli, and others, Marx implicitly criticized them: Some parties may wail over it; others may wish to get rid of modern arts, in order to get rid of modern conflicts (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 14, p. 656). Marx was addressing the Chartists in English at the anniversary celebration of the Peoples Paper on April 14, 1856, and he couched his concept of the dialectic of forces and relations of production in popular language, using the archetype of the trickster to underscore the irony of the progress of industry.

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On our part, we do not mistake the shape of the shrewd spirit that continues to mark all these contradictions. We know that to work well the new-fangled forces of society, they only want to be mastered by new-fangled menand such are the working men. They are as much the product of modern time as machinery itself. In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy and poor prophets of regression, we do recognize our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneerthe Revolution. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 14, p. 656)

Marx connects two well-known images from Shakespeare. In A Midsummers Night Dream, the fairy says to Puck, Either I mistake your shape and making quite, Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Calld Robin Goodfellow. . . . Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck, You do their work, and they shall have good luck. (Shakespeare, 1948, p. 27) And in Hamlet, the prince says of the ghostly spectre who speaks from below, Well said, old mole. Canst work i the earth so fast? A worthy pioner! (Shakespeare, 1992, p. 28). The word pioner here means digger, a perfect metaphor for the subversive trickster. By calling into being a modern working class capable of exercising democratic control of all the forces of society, the industrial revolution, Marx felt, was undermining itself and setting the stage for a social revolution. Yet, even in this popular presentation, Marx dealt with the estrangement and reification of social relations: All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 14, p. 656). Here again was perhaps an allusion to Mary Shelleys (1965) dystopic image of Victor bestowing animation upon lifeless matter (p. 51). William Morris agreed with Marx that the issue was not the complex technology emerging in the industrial revolution but the question of who would control these new tools and who would determine future directions. Morris, like Marx, but unlike most of the reformers of the 19th century, insisted on workers control, the selfgovernment of the producers, as Marx called it (Marx & Engels, 1971b, p. 74). In an 1884 article, Morris wrote,
Of course it is impossible to go back to such a simple system [medieval production]. . . . On the other hand . . . the workman should again have control over his material, his tools, and his time; only that control must no longer be of the individual workman, as in the Middle Ages, but of the whole body of workmen. When the workers organize work for the benefit of the workers . . . they will once more know what is meant by art. (Mahamdalie, 1996, p. 64)

As a member of the William Morris Society writes, Work is presented in News from Nowhere as a necessity of life, needed and hungered after (Watkinson, 1990, p. 91). Marx and Morris have a similar vision of work becoming a passion, as it was to Prometheus, an aesthetic mode beyond drudgery or sycophancy, when after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but lifes prime want (McLellan, 1977, p. 569).

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Marx was a critical heir to the best of the utopian visionaries and their romantic successors. He criticized elitist views on the left as well as the right, condemning barracks-communism (Avineri, 1971, p. 238) with as much vigor as William Morris condemned Bellamys nationalization and state socialism. Throughout his political life, Marx criticized social measures octroyed [handed down] from the throne and not (instead of being) conquered by the people (Marx & Engels, 1971b, p. 126). Thus, he was an implacable opponent of Bonapartism and Bismarckism, and its reflection in the Royal Prussian government socialism of the academic socialists (kathedersozialisten), who inspired the Fabians, and Ferdinand Lassalle in the General Association of German Workers, which put its stamp on the German Social Democratic party (Marx & Engels, 1987, p. 97). Marx loathed bureaucratic government, . . . where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends, and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals (Draper, 1977, p. 396). CONCLUSION: THE GREENING OF THEORY The Greens are a diverse phenomenon embracing various theories and practices. Those who consider themselves to be anti-Prometheus and post-Marx need not fear any orthodoxy, but they may come under criticism from within and outside of the Green movement if their conclusions are based on weak arguments and deficient scholarship. The analysis in this article should put to rest the canard of Prometheus as a symbol of economic gigantism or megatechnology. It is doubtful that such a conception could have become commonplace without the context of the cold war. In the charge leveled at Marx of Prometheanism as a personality defect or derangement or complex, the cold warriors were implicitly indicting many, if not most, of the great artists and poets of Western culture from Aeschylus to Shelley. In shunning Marx, they were also promoting an ignorance of the themes of human betterment and radical change carried like a torch across centuries and continents. A poet in his youth as well as a lover of the written and spoken arts throughout his life, Marx felt that this was the inheritance of the modern working class, whatever its original sources. Even today, Marx cannot be read without an understanding of his sweeping references to the great achievements in that tradition. The work that Marx started in social science, political science, and political economy needs to be continued, amended, and extended to deal with the crises of today. By treating Marx as a dead dog, who is not worthy of study, academics serve the cause of cynicism and quiescence. Greens, such as Charlene Spretnak, who write about Marxs enthusiastic embrace of economism (Spretnak, 1997, p. 43) simply recapitulate the way that many status quo scholars have dismissed Marx. Nowhere does Spretnak (or most other leading Greens) challenge the indefensible identification of Stalinism, which boasted that it was Marxism-Leninism, with the democratic (and antibureaucratic) socialist movement, that Marx and Morris and many others tried to create. As part of the task of reconstructing a movement for radical change in the next century, theorists today have an obligation to set the record straightto finally, at the sunset of the old century, let Minervas owl take flight. It has often been quoted, but the following passage from Morriss A Dream of John Ball sums up the situation of the Greens as they enter an ongoing struggle against capital with only a distorted sense of historical traditions:

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I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name. (Mahamdalie, 1996, p. 83; Morris, 1986, p. 53)

Despite his insistence on the importance of critical science in transforming society, Marx, like Hegel, often expressed the realization that all theory paled and wilted in its contrast with the living world. They both were fond of quoting Goethes Mephistopheles: Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theories, Und grn des Lebens goldner Baum (Goethe, n.d., p. 57). That is, But grey, dear friends, is all theory, and green alone lifes golden tree. Reading their old works of 1844, Marx wrote to Engels in 1863 about their youthful hopes:
And then, the very illusion that, tomorrow or the day after, the result will actually spring to life as history lends the whole thing a warmth, vitality, and humour with which the later grey on grey contrasts damned unfavourably. (Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 41, p. 469; also see Marx & Engels, 1971a, p. 116; Marx & Engels, 1975, Vol. 41, p. 411)

Hopefully, Green theory will be the Prometheus to spark new life into the social movement of the next century and the Minerva to breathe wisdom into its sense of history.
APPENDIX Prometheus Archetypes From 1300 to 1900

Prometheus Progenitor: The Sculptor of Men

1316-1328 c. 1390 c. 1530 c. 1549 c. 1559 1590 1602 1603 c. 1616 1619 1712 1739 1743 1773 1775 1801 1801 Anonymous French. Prometheus animating man. Poem after Ovid. John Gower, 1330?-1408. Prometheus. Poem in Confessio amantis. Domenico Beccafumi, 1486-1551. Prometheus Creates Man. Fresco. Parmigianino, 1503-1540. Prometheus Animating Man. Drawing. Hendrik Goltzius, 1558-1617. Prometheus Making Man and Animating Him With Fire From Heaven. Engraving. Edmund Spenser, 1552?-1599. Prometheus creates Elf in The Fairie Queen. Romance epic. Domenichino (Dominico) Zampieri, 1581-1641. Prometheus Freed by Hercules. Fresco. Francisco Pacheco, 1564-1654. Prometheus (with torch and clay man). Ceiling painting. Guercino, 1591-1666. Prometheus (animates the clay statue with fire). Fresco (detached). Denys Calvaert, 1540-1619. Prometheus Molding Man from Clay. Drawing. Richard Blakemore, c. 1650-1729. Creation: A Philosophical Poem. Francesco Aquilanti. The Fable of Prometheus, When He Took Fire From the Sun to Animate the Statue. Ballet. Pompeo Batoni, 1708-1787. Prometheus Fashioning Man From Clay. Painting. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832. Prometheus. Unfinished drama and poem fragment in 1774. Charles Pierre Colardeau, 1732-1776. The Men of Prometheus. Tragedy. Ludwig von Beethoven, 1770-1827. The Creatures of Prometheus. Ballet score for Vigano. Salvatore Vigano, 1769-1827. The Creatures of Prometheus. Ballet.

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Jean-Simon Berthlemy, 1743-1811. Man Formed by Prometheus and Animated by Minerva. Ceiling painting. 1807-1808 Bertel Thorwaldsen, 1770-1844. Minerva Grants a Soul to Mankind Created by Prometheus. Marble relief. 1813 Salvatore Vigano, 1769-1827. Prometheus. Mime ballet. Music by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Weigl, Vigano. 1817 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1797-1851. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Novel. 1817-1820 Johann Nepomuk Haller, 1792-1826. Prometheus (creating man). Marble statue. 1829-1830 Peter Cornelius, 1783-1867. Prometheus With Clay Man and Minerva. Fresco. 1844 Augustus Hus the Younger, fl. 1827-1853. Prometheus (the creatures of Prometheus). Ballet, after Vigano. 1850 Franz Liszt, 1811-1886. Orpheus and Prometheus. Symphonic poem. 1889 Hugo Wolf, 1860-1903. Prometheus. Song, after Goethe. 1895 Hermann Hango, 1861-1934. Faust and Prometheus. Poem.

1802

Prometheus and Athene/Minerva

Toussaint Dubreuil, c. 1561-1602. Prometheus, Accompanied by Minerva, Stealing Fire From the Wheel of Apollos Chariot. Drawing for a ceiling painting (in the Louvre). c. 1603 Annibale Carracci, 1560-1609. Minerva and Prometheus. Fresco design. 1700s Bertel Thorswaldsen. Minerva Grants a Soul to Mankind Created by Prometheus. Marble relief for the Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen. 1802 Jean-Simon Bathlemy. Man Formed by Prometheus and Animated by Minerva. Ceiling repainted by Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse in 1826 (in the Louvre). 1807-1808 Bertel Thorwaldsen, 1770-1844. Minerva Grants a Soul to Mankind Created by Prometheus. Marble relief. 1829-1830 Peter Cornelious. Prometheus With Clay-Man and Minerva. Frescoe (in the Glyptothek vestibule in Munich). 1602

Prometheus Pyrphorus: The Trickster Who Brings Fire

Battista Zeolotti, c. 1526-1578. Prometheus Stealing Fire. Fresco. Toussaint Dubreuil, c. 1561-1602. Prometheus, Accompanied by Minerva, Stealing Fire From the Wheel of Apollos Chariot. Drawing, attributed. 1603 Francisco Pacheco, 1564-1654. Prometheus (with torch and clay man). Ceiling painting. 1636 Peter Paul Rubens, 1577-1640, executed by Jan Crossiers. Prometheus (with fire). Painting. 1739 Francesco Aquilanti. The Fable of Prometheus, When He Took Fire From the Sun to Animate the Statue. Ballet. 1800-1850 Giusseppe Collignon, 1776-1863. Prometheus Stealing the Fire of Heaven (from Apollos chariot). Ceiling fresco. 1812 Lord Byron, 1788-1824. Childe Harolds Pilgrimage (Prometheus gives fire to man). Poem. 1812 Lord Byron, 1788-1824. The Prophecy of Dante. (Prometheuss theft of fire invoked in). Poem. 1837 Joseph Lanner, 1891-1843. PrometheusSparks. Instrumental composition. 1838 Edgar Quinet, 1803-1875. Prometheus Inventor of Fire. First of trilogy of three poems. 1841 Adolf Bernard Marx, 1795?-1866. The Smithy of Prometheus. Song, after Goethe. 1578 1602

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c. 1844 1858 1858 1864 1875 1877 1879 1883 1889 1895 1900

Heinrich Heine, 1797-1856. Church Councilor Prometheus. Poem, in New Poems. Arnold Bcklin, 1827-1901. The Finding of Fire or Prometheus With Adam and Eve by the First Fire. Painting. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882. Prometheus. Poem. Richard Henry Horne, 1803-1884. Prometheus, the Fire-Bringer. Verse drama. Anselm Feuerbach, 1829-1880. Prometheus as Founder of the Hearth. Painting. Mario Rapisardi, 1844-1912. Lucifer (Prometheus as Lucifer, bearer of light). Poem. Giosue Carducci, 1836-1907. Ode to Satan (as a Prometheus-figure). Poem. Robert Bridges, 1844-1930. Prometheus, the Fire-Giver. Masque. Christian Griepenkerl, 1839-1916. Prometheus as Founder of the Hearth. Painting, after Anselm Feuerbach. Hartman Hango, 1861-1934. Faust and Prometheus. Poem. Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904. Prometheus Pyrphorus (fire-bringer). Verse drama.

Prometheus Knowing: The Culture Hero (specific and general)

1510-1520 Piero di Cosimo, c. 1462-1521. The Myth of Prometheus. Pendant paintings. c. 1561 Battista Zelotti, c. 1526-1578. Prometheus. Fresco. 1578 Pierre de Ronsard, 1524-1585. (Poet consumed by his passion, like Prometheus by his vulture) Sonnet 13 of Les Sonnets pour Hlne. 1603 Francis Bacon, 1561-1626. Prometheus or The State of Man in Wisdom of the Ancients. 1615 Ben Johnson, 1572-1637. (Prometheus in) Mercury Vindicated From the Alchemists. Masque. 1619 Michael Drayton, 1563-1631. (Prometheus evoked in) Sonnet 14 of Idea. 1666 Franois Girardon, 1628-1715. Prometheus. Terra-cotta, destroyed. 1674 Jean de La Fontaine, 1621-1695. (Prometheus in) Daphne. Libretto for opera ballet. 1685 Pierre Beauchamps, 1631-1705. Promethe. Music entre in Ballet des arts. 1694 Pierre Puget, 1620-1694. Prometheus. Terra-cotta sculpture, attributed. 1725 Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745. Prometheus. Satirical poem, published as a broadsheet. 1728 Ippolito Zanelli. Prometeo. Libretto, serenata. c. 1765 Nicholas-Sebastien Adam, 1705-1778. Prometheus. 1775 Heinrich Leopold Wagner, 1747-1779. Prometheus, Deukalion, and Their Critics. Verse satire. 1776 John Abraham Fisher, 1744-1806. Prometheus. Pantomime. 1797 Vincenzo Monti, 1754-1828. Il Prometeo. Poem. 1797 August Wilhelm von Schlegel, 1776-1845. Prometheus. Poem in Schillers 1798 Musenalmanach. 1803 Johannes Daniel Falk, 1768-1826. Prometheus. Dramatic poem. 1808 P. Ochs de Ble. Promethe. Libretto, opera. 1812 Alessandro Manzoni, 1785-1873. (Prometheus invoked in) Sacred Hymns. Poem. c. 1839 William Rimmer, 1816-1879. Prometheus. Drawing. 1843 James Russell Lowell, 1819-1891. Prometheus. 1858 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882. Prometheus. Poem. 1861 Thomas Ashe, 1836-1889. The Myth of Prometheus. Poem. 1862 Domenico Bolognese, 1819-1891. Prometheo. Tragedy. 1865 Louise Ackerman, 1813-1890. Promthe. Poem.

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1865 1867 1877 1877 1882 1892 c. 1894 1894 1895 1898 1899 1899

Woldemar Bargiel, 1828-1897. Overture to Prometheus. Orchestral composition. Peter Benoit, 1834-1901. Prometheus. Oratorio. Olegario Victor Andrade, 1841-1882. Prometheo. Poem. Viktor Rydberg, 1828-1895. Prometheo och Ahasuerus. Poem. Hermann von Lingg, 1820-1905. Prometheus. Poem. Heinrich Hoffmann, 1842-1902. Prometheus. Choral composition. Max Klinger, 1857-1920. Prometheus saga depicted in seven plates of Brahms-fantasy cycle. Etchings. Eugen von Jagow, 1849-1905. Prometheus. Allegorical drama. Roger Dumas. Promthe. Poem. Johann Peter Selmer, 1844-1910. Prometheus. Symphonic poem. Andr Gide, 1869-1951. Prometheus Misbound. Satirical sketch. Domenico Milelli, 1841-1905. Prometheo. Poem cycle.

Prometheus Bound: The Tortured Visionary

1494-1495 Sandro Botticelli, 1445-1510. (Prometheus in frieze in setting of) The Calumny of Appeles. Painting. 1523-1533 Michaelangelo Buonarroti, 1475-1564. Tityus. Drawing. 1549 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 1488-1576. Tityus. Painting. 1553 Giovanni Bernardi, 1496-1553. Prometheus. Bronze plaque. 1554 Cornelis Anthonisz Teunissen, 1500-1554. Pandora and the Fettered Prometheus. Drawing. 1556 Coriolano Martirano, c. 1503-1558. Prometheus. Tragedy. 1558 Sebastiano de Valentinis, ?-c. 1560. (The torture of) Prometheus. Etching. 1559 Garofalo, c. 1481-1559. The Torture of Prometheus. Fresco. 1566 Cornelius Cort. Prometheus. Engraving. 1570 Francesco Morandini, called Il Poppi, 1544-1597. Nature Offering Chained Prometheus a Piece of Quartz. Ceiling painting. 1578 Pierre de Ronsard, 1524-1585. (Poet consumed by his passion, like Prometheus by his vulture) Sonnet 13 of Les Sonnets pour Hlne. 1606 Karel van Mander, 1548-1606. Prometheus (tortured by an eagle). 1610 Micelangelo de Caravaggio, 1571-1610. Prometheus. Painting. 1610 Peter Paul Rubens, 1577-1640, and Frans Snyders, 1579-1657. Prometheus Bound. Painting. 1622-1624 Jusepe de Ribera, c. 1590-1652. Prometheus. Painting. Also in 1622-1624 as a drawing and in c. 1632 as a painting. 1623 Dirck van Baburen, c. 1590-1624. Prometheus Being Chained by Vulcan. Painting. c. 1634 Vincenzo Mannozzi, ?-1567. (Prometheus bound in) Inferno. Painting. 1637 Theodoor Rombouts, 1597-1637. Prometheus (bound). Painting. 1638 Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, 1562-1638. Prometheus. Drawing. 1638 Paulus Moreelse, 1571-1638. Prometheus Chained by Vulcan. Painting, unlocated. Also Prometheus Tortured by the Eagle. Painting, untraced. c. 1640 Jacob Jordaens, 1593-1678, with Frans Snyders, 1579-1657. Prometheus Bound (with eagle). Painting. 1651-1652 Salvatore Rosa, 1615-1673. Prometheus (bound). Painting. Also in 1637-1640. Prometheus Bound. Painting, lost. 1654 Alessandro Algardi, 1598-1654. Prometheus in Torment. Marble sculpture, lost. 1656 Abrahan Cowley, 1618-1667. Prometheus Ill Painted. Poem in his Poems. 1659 Frans Wouters, 1612-1659. Prometheus Bound. Painting. 1660 Nicolaus Knupfer, c. 1603-c. 1660. Prometheus Bound. Drawing.

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1669 1672 1703 1705 1725 1733 1738 1767 1769 1769 1770

1792-1794 1814

1814 1820 c. 1822 1825-1830 1829 1833 1837 1838 1838 1843 1844 1844 1845 1846-1847 1849 1850 1851 1855 1858 1862-1863 1865 1866 1867

Pedro Calderon de la Barca, 1600-1681. La estatua de Prometeo. Comedy with music by Juan Hidalgo. Francesco Antonio Arezzo, ?-1672. Il Prometheo. Verse tragedy. Philippe Bertrand, 1664-1724. Prometheus (bound to the rock). Bronze sculpture. Luca Giordano, 1634-1705. Prometheus. Painting, after de Ribera. Also two other paintings of Prometheus (bound) and Prometheus. Giovanni Battista Foggini, 1652-1725. Mercury Binding Prometheus. Bronze statuette. Gerard Hoet the Elder, 1648-1733. Prometheus Bound. Painting. Nicholas-Sebastien Adam, 1705-1778. Prometheus Tortured. Marble statue. Also Prometheus. Marble statue. Lambert Sigibert Adam, 1700-1759. Prometheus. Marble sculpture. Thomas Banks, 1735-1805. Prometheus. Life-size sculpture model. Fjodor Gordjejeff, 1744-1810. Prometheus Bound. Marble sculpture group. Also Prometheus. Bronze sculpture. Henry Fuseli, 1741-1825. Prometheus. Drawing. Also in 1800-1810 Hephaestus, Bia, and Cratus Chain Prometheus on Mount Caucusus and Prometheus and Io. Drawings. John Flaxman, 1755-1826. Aeschylus illustrations. Lord Byron, 1788-1824. Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte. Satirical poem, published anonymously. In 1816 Prometheus. Poem in The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems. William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. (Prometheus bound evoked in) The Excursion. Poem. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 1796-1849. Prometheus. Dramatic poem. Vincenzo Monti, 1754-1828. Il Prometheo. Epic poem, unfinished. William Etty, 1787-1849. Prometheus. Painting. Ernst von Feuchtersleben, 1806-1849. Prometheus. Poem. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1806-1861. Prometheus Bound. Verse translation of Aeschylus. Thodore Caruelle dAligny, 1798-1871. Prometheus. Painting. Jean-Franois Millet, 1814-1875. Prometheus on the Rock. Painting. Edgar Quinet, 1803-1875. Prometheus Bound. Second of trilogy of three poems. Washington Allston, 1779-1843. Prometheus. Drawing. Paul Bour, 1823-1848. Prometheus Bound. Bronze sculpture. James Russell Lowell, 1819-1891. Prometheus. Poem in Poems. Thophile Gautier, 1811-1872. Prometheus in Museum of Madrid. Sonnet, on Ribera. Thomas Cole, 1801-1848. Prometheus Bound. Painting. Jacques Fromenal Halvy, 1799-1862. Prometheus Bound. Orchestral composition. Joseph Lies, 1821-1865. Prometheus Bound. Painting. Cyprian Kamil Norwid, 1821-1883. Promethidion. Verse dialogue. Victor Hugo, 1802-1885. (The vulture of Prometheus in) The Ocean From Above. Poem. When Aeschylus With the Vulture Fights Prometheus. Poem. Arnold Bcklin, 1827-1901. Prometheus Bound. Painting. Also in 1862, Prometheus and the Vulture and in 1882, Prometheus. Paintings. Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889. Aeschylus: Promtheus Desmots. Poem. Robert Reece, 1838-1891. (pseudonym: E. G. Lankester). Prometheus or The Man on the Rock. Extravaganza. Jos-Maria de Heredia, 1842-1905. Promthe. Sonnet. Edward Yardley. Prometheus. Poem.

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1868

Gustave Moreau, 1826-1898. Prometheus. Painting. Also wax models for sculptures in 1869, Prometheus Struck by Lightning. Painting. 1871 Honor Daumier, 1898-1879. Promethean France and the Eagle Vulture. Lithograph. 1874 William Blake Richmond, 1842-1921. Prometheus Bound. Painting. 1875 Anselm Feuerbach, 1829-1880. Prometheus Mourned by the Oceanids. Painting. 1876 George Eliot, 1819-1880. Prometheus Bound read to Mordecai in Daniel Deronda. Novel. 1876 Edouard Schur, 1841-1929. Promthe. Poem. c. 1877 Andr Messager, 1853-1929. Prometheus Bound. Cantata. 1880 Hans Makart, 1840-1884. Prometheus (and the vulture). Oil sketch. 1881 Carl Spitteler, 1845-1924. Prometheus and Epithemeus. Prose epic. Also Prometheus the Sufferer. Verse epic, published 1924. 1882 Camile Du Commun du Locle, 1832-1902. Prometheus Bound. Poem. 1885 Georges Mathias, 1826-1910. Prometheus Bound. Cantata. 1885 Lucien Lambert, 1858-1945. Prometheus Bound. Cantata. 1885 Gerhart Hauptman, 1862-1946. The Prometheans Fate. Epic poem. 1886 Ernest Myers, 1844-1921. The Judgement of Prometheus. Poem. 1887 Robert Browning, 1812-1889. (Prometheus Bound evoked in) Parleyings With Certain People of Importance in Their Day. 1887 Richard Watson Dixon, 1833-1900. Mercury to Prometheus. Poem. 1889 Briton Riviere, 1840-1920. Prometheus. Painting. 1890 Kurt Goldmark, 1830-1915. Prometheus Bound. Overture. 1892 Leopoldo Miguez, 1850-1902. Prometeu. Symphonic poem. 1895 Johann Eduard Mller, 1828-1895. Prometheus and the Oceanids. Sculpture group. 1895-1896 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 1824-1898. Prometheus Bound and Aeschylus writing in Dramatic Poetry, Painting. 1899 Andre Gide, 1869-1951. Prometheus Misbound. Satirical sketch. 1899 Ivan Gilkin, 1858-1924. Promthe. Dramatic poem. 1900 Gabriel Faur, 1845-1924. Promthe. Opera tragedy.

Prometheus Unbound: The Liberated Champion

1602 Toussaint Dubreuil, c. 1561-1602. Hercules Freeing Prometheus. Drawing for ceiling decoration. c. 1603 AnnibaleCarracci, 1560-1609. Hercules Freeing Prometheus. Design for fresco. c. 1697 Luca Giordano, 1634-1705. Hercules Freeing Prometheus. Fresco. 1703 Nicolas Bertin, 1668-1736. Hercules Delivers Prometheus. Painting. 1762 Georg Christoph Wagenseil, 1715-1777. Prometheus Freed. Serenata, Libretto. 1781-1785 Henry Fuseli, 1747-1825. Hercules Slays the Eagle of Prometheus. 1792 Georg Christoph Tobler. Prometheus Freed. Poem. c. 1793 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832. The Freeing of Prometheus. Dramatic poem, unfinished. 1802 Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803. Prometheus Unbound. Dramatic poem, fragment. 1820 Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822. Prometheus Unbound. Dramatic poem. 1829 Ernst von Feuchtersleben, 1806-1849. Prometheus Unbound. Dramatic fragment. 1829-1830 Peter Cornelius, 1783-1867. Prometheus Freed by Hercules. Fresco. 1838 Edgar Quinet, 1803-1875. Prometheus Freed. Poem, third of trilogy. 1844 Louis Mnard, 1822-1901. Prometheus Freed. Epic poem.

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1850 1866 1867 1876 1880 1880 1882 1889 1891

Franz Liszt, 1811-1886. Chorus for Herders Prometheus Unbound. Overture and choral composition, rescored as symphonic poem in 1855. J. De Strada, 1821-1902. (Prometheuss dying in) The Death of the Gods. Drama. Also The Prometheus of the Future. Drama, 1895. Camille Saint-Saens, 1835-1921. The Wedding of Prometheus. Cantata. Siegfried Lipiner, 1856-1911. Prometheus Unbound. Poem. Charles Hubert Parry, 1848-1918. Scenes From Shelleys Prometheus Unbound. Cantata. John Addington Symonds, 1840-1893. Prometheus Dead. Poem. William Blake Richmond, 1842-1921. The Release of Prometheus by Hercules. Painting. mile Duneau. Prometheus: The People Liberated. Cantata for the French Revolution centennial. Richard Dehmel, 1863-1920. Prometheus Freed. Poem.

Source: Reid (1993), passim, with additional entries.

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