Remembering Spartacus

Parmeshwar Devkota

The workers around the world celebrated the International Labour Day on May 1st by remembering Haymarket incident in Chicago of the United States of America. On the May 1st in the year 1886 AD, the workers were demanding for an eight-hour work day and demonstrating peacefully at the Haymarket area in Chicago, amid the demonstrations, a bomb was exploded killing seven policemen and four demonstrators. The unwanted incident emboldened the demand of the workers, so eight hour work, eight hour merrymaking and eight hour sleep came into practice. 

The leftist political movement also supported the workers’ campaign by forming various types of organisations on the parameters of Surplus Value System propounded by one of the great philosopher of all time, Karl Marx. 

Therefore, on this day, the labour organisations, especially, left oriented ones hold big banners and chant rhetoric slogans in unison and hit the streets of the main cities every year. As the labour leaders deliver sugar-coated speeches, naïve fellow workers labourers clasp their hands with great enthusiasm. But, the condition of the labourers has been remaining almost same for ages. The economic condition of the labourers and their social status has remained almost as it was before the movement began. It is said,  at present,  96 persons hold the fifty per cent asset of the whole world and remaining fifty per cent has been  shared by the eight billion people of the world.

Believe it or not, the majority of labourer leaders are cause behind this disparity in the present day civilization, because they work either as compatriots of the owners of industrialists or toil for their own benefits; rather than, waging relentless struggle against accumulation of property by capitalist industrialists as Spartacus had done.  

Spartacus was one of the gladiators, slave performer, at a gladiators’ school in the city of Capua in Italy in 74 BCE. He was the inhabitant of somewhere in Balkan Peninsula and was taken as a prisoner by a powerful Roman. Though Spartacus was slave and alone, but, as he was selected leader of the defected gladiators, he ordered his few dozen friends to take sharpened poles and kitchen knives against three thousand strong Roman army. As the struggle proceeded after escaping from Mount Vesuvius, other Roman slaves joined his move of liberation by capturing army posts and confiscating weapons of various types. Though Spartacus was killed by Roman army and six thousand soldiers were hanged and thousands were killed or fled in the three years of war, but he remained faithful to his friends till his death. 

As Spartacus remained faithful to his friends and movement, thus, if all the leaders of the present day labour organisations work in unison for the betterment of all the labourers with good faith, they can change the shape of the world. At least, they can provide appropriate condition to all the workers the world. But, the problem is with the majority of the labourer organization leaders. They do not carry on the issues of the labourers and their organisations; rather, negotiate for their own benefits. So, the new generation workers should consider Spartacus as their model for the positive change.