Really? In the Roman Colliseum people were tied to stakes and eaten by bears for mass public entertainment. Inca priests would skin their sacrifices alive, and wear the skin, inside out so that the fat hung in little bubbles, and be praised for doing so. Fijian chiefs not only ate defeated tribes but did it in a public ceremony, arranging their roasted victims in tableaux, like a display in the natural history museum befor eating them. Commoners, according to accounts, lived among these scenes of depravity in constant terror of being bludgeoned and eaten.
And before anyone falls for the obvious rhetorical ploy, there are indeed cruelties and vicious behaviour in capitalist societies, but they stand out in attributing intrinsic value and a presumption of agency to the mass of the citizenry, which pre-capitalist societies simply did not. When the (comparatively less vicious) atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib were made public, the US government and military were shamed, in a way that pre-capitalist elites would have found unintelligible.