Spartacus

[flaming bolshevik]

Don't know much about him, what are your thoughts on him?

[Kingfish]

A figure who we know very little about, however what made him special was the key role he played in leading one of the most significant slave revolts in ancient times providing a good example of class conflict as well as a lesson in historical materialism.


Much like the peasants and their leaders who would revolt in later ages there is a temptation to see these figures as proto-communists however this is not the case as the conditions (both cultural and those relating to the mature of production) meant that these groups were not in fact the revolutionary class of their times, despite the resemblance to the proletariat of our own. The slaves simply wished to return to their home countries and the peasants sought redress from local abuses neither of these groups sought to abolish slavery or feudalism as an institution.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I think what the ancient slaves and modern prols have in common is that they are both the main exploited and oppressed class of their times: the whole society rested on their shoulders.

I've read the old Howard Fast historical-fiction book (that the Kirk Douglas movie is based on) which is interesting enough in the context (CP writer, historical-fiction, written after WWII) and more politically interesting than the film.

The book is limited but some of the tensions within the book itself are interesting. I think the author seems conscious of not trying to present Spartacus as a "great man" of history, but to goes back and fourth between a sort of crude Stalinist romanticization of a figure and a more nuanced version. The author gets around some of this by having the story follow people after the fact... And mostly aristocratic people. So in this way Spartacus can be presented as "larger than life" because what he represents to the aristocrats is larger than their ideologies and understanding of the world will allow them to comprehend. All the aristocrats are presented as having a sort of existential crisis after the uprising.

Some of the heroics of the book are campy (like in the movie) but not completely uninspiring... It's fun to see a shitty society turned on it's head and to see oppressed people suddenly become confident and in charge of their lives and as equals to the old masters that even the slaves themselves were convinced were actually their betters.

Although there is evidence that he was a real person, there's so little information (huh, an empire doesn't want to talk a lot about the main crack and vunurability of their power... Go figure) that Spartacus is more of a symbol or a Robin Hood than a real historical individual. The book handles this by having other people discuss their interpretations of Spartacus. And although there isn't the same "I am Spartacus" thing as in the movie, you definitely get the sense that as a symbol, Spartacus is like an infection that is hard to stop once it (a basic yearning for liberation and true community among people) spreads.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Fun note about the Fast novel: Howard Fast wrote the book after he was in prison for contempt of congress after he refused to name names at a congressional hearing. He actually had to self-publish the first edition because he'd been blacklisted by most publishers and hollywood studios (he was also a screenwriter) at that time.

The screenplay for the film version was also written by another blacklisted CP writer, Dalton Trumbo (of Johnny Got His Gun fame). In fact, this film is often credited with basically killing the whole black-listing system when President Kennedy crossed an anti-communist picket line to see the film.

[genjer]

The slaves simply wished to return to their home countries and the peasants sought redress from local abuses neither of these groups sought to abolish slavery or feudalism as an institution.
We don't know that, any more than we know that Spartacus was a utopian communist.

The slaves didn't return to their home countries when they had the chance; most of them turned back after reaching the Alps, and marched South back into Italy for unknown reasons.

There's also zero evidence that they wanted to continue slavery. Spartacus may have intended to conquer Sicily and rule it as a king like the rebel slave Eunus had done in the First Servile War, but if he had been successful it is unlikely that outright slavery would have reappeared on Sicily for at least a few generations. It is also almost impossible to believe that an army of ex-slaves would have tolerated the idea of continuing the hated institution of slavery.

[The Red Star Rising]

Comparing Ancient Rome, which existed before Adam Smith was even a twinkle in his father's eye, to modern Capitalistic systems seem a bit silly doesn't it? Marx covered the Slave holding and Feudalistic stages of history only in brief specifically because they were rather irrelevant to industrial society.

It's important to remember that people in Spartacus' day thought under very different terms than we do. Independence would have likely have entailed establishing his own country in sicily, likely not a slaveholding one, but a revolt aimed to topple the Roman institution of slavery across it's vast empire was very unlikely to be Spartacus' goal.

Freedom back then, largely entailed autonomy rather than the modern concept of liberty. For example, the Greek resistance to Persia was not born out of Persia being some kind of despotic state (for it's time the Achmaenid Empire was actually remarkably enlightened), but because they simply didn't want the Persians bossing them around.

Spartacus' revolt obviously was less self-centric obviously, he called to Slaves of all stripes, but given the thought styles in the time period, I really can't imagine him trying to take on the entirety of the Roman juggernaut and it's adamantium hard dependence on the slave trade. Not to mention that if he tried to take on all of Rome at once during it's zenith, he'd have gone down hard. By Spartacus' time, Rome dominated the western world to an extent no nation before or since ever has. People talk about American dominance or the Pax Britannia? They didn't have shit on Rome's dominance by that time. Oh sure in terms of absolute territory and population Rome isn't half as big as America or Britain, but the western world was pretty much just Rome and some Celts and Germans pushed out to the fringe of the world.

Spartacus was a smart man, he'd know that trying to overthrow all of Rome at once would be suicide. Rather, the goal was likely always to inflict enough defeats on Rome for them to allow him to establish a kingdom in peace. Unfortunately Spartacus didn't learn from Hannibal and Phillip the V's examples, Rome wasn't a state that threw in the towel when it thought it had a chance of winning. They stuck to their swords no matter how dark it seemed, confident that the future would hold their triumph (this is one of Rome's historical advantages over other nation states of the time, unless you had soldiers in Rome itself, they weren't giving up until you conceded defeat), and that's something cost Spartacus his dream.

A similar phenomenom can be seen in the Axis powers and Confederate States of America later on, who had hoped that scoring major victories would win them a favourable peace against their enemies (save for Hitler's war on the USSR), failing to realize that their enemies wouldn't settle for anything less than the end of their continued ability to threaten them. But history tends to show a lot of the same patterns popping up when similar conditions arise.