The wonderful film moment in 1960's "Spartacus," with the survivors rising as one and saying "I Am Spartacus," is a pure fabrication. The historians of the time say that Spartacus was seen to fall in battle, but no one could find his body afterward. He probably escaped in the confusion. Fifteen thousand of the Spartacani succeeded in fleeing the battle. Six thousand going north ran into Pompey the Great returning with his army from Spain in Northern Italy, and were slaughtered. Nine thousand disappeared into the Bruttian Mountains, to be hunted down, starve, or die of exposure.
The six thousand six hundred captured by Crassus met a horrible death--crucifixion: one every one hundred feet for the one hundred and thirty-two Roman miles of the Via Appia between Capua and Rome. There was no breaking of legs to make the deaths quicker, and the bodies hung on the crosses until they rotted off eighteen months later.
I went through this brief recapitulation of the history of Spartacus and his revolt to make a point. As much as I love the theory and practice of non-violence as stated by Gandhi and King, it could not always work throughout history. Non-violence, civil disobedience, and passive resistance can only work in a society or civilization where all human life is believed to have intrinsic value. The oligarchs are attempting to do away with that belief in the value of all human beings in America for that reason.
In Rome, and throughout history, a slave has had no intrinsic value. As Hegel stated above, "Thus in Roman law, for instance, no definition of man was possible, because it excluded the slave," (op. cit., p.22). The slave could be killed, mutilated, tortured, raped, starved, beaten and abused without any legal recourse, because they were property. This was equally true two thousand years later in the Antebellum South.
The devaluation of Humanity to being a thing, the expunging of Humanity's intrinsic value, is a grave danger to any civilization. Today, we risk the very idea of the Human Being destroyed by the legal convention of corporate personhood.
A corporation is by definition property, held by shareholders. The corporation's historical purpose has been to help protect those shareholders against financial ruin should the corporation be forced into liquidation. By saying that it has any of the same rights as a natural person, a human being of flesh and blood, undercuts one of the primary arguments against slavery: human beings cannot be property; it is contrary to the dignity of the human being to be considered property. Its purpose is to protect human beings, not to be protected as if it were a human being.
Whatever protections and privileges a corporation has, should be solely determined by its corporate charter, and the laws of the governments under which that charter was issued. As a thing, it cannot have rights--it is not a human being.
The oligarchs ultimate aim is to use issues like this one and establish a multi-tier class system in our country--and around the world--where only those at the top of the economic ladder have any real rights, and those at the bottom--like the slaves of Rome--have none. The fact that corporations provide their executives with a layer of legal protection when endangering the public that the rest of us lack, is a prima facie example of this oligarchic advantage.
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