The point I was making was that serfdom can be best viewed as a legal system. Local nobles were the government and the serfs lived under a set of laws that were harsh and biased against them. But that doesn’t mean the serfs were the property of the nobles.
I also live under a set of laws, as does virtually everyone on the planet. I’m fortunate and the laws I live under are reasonable and I have some influence in their making (with the former being a reflection of the latter). But I am not free to simply opt out of the legal system. The law applies to me and will be enforced upon me regardless of whether or not I agree to it. I can move but all that will do is place me under a different set of laws.
I feel like there is some equivocation in your argument, but then that’s kind of the whole point (so much of this hinges on vagaries in language and different understandings or usages of terms critical to the discussion). I don’t think you’re arguing in bad faith, only that the existence of this argument, this point of contention, is precisely what has started us on the tangent.
Slavery today, in America, generally refers to what was practiced in America for much of its history prior to the Civil War. To be free, in America, generally refers to possessing the rights normally considered due to American citizens under the constitution and not being deprived of those rights through imprisonment or other kind of forcible curtailment of liberty. But neither the American version of freedom nor the American version of slavery are universal or natural conditions. So to divine an answer to the question posed by the OP, with so many different views on freedom and slavery throughout history and across cultures, is actually a much more complicated question (even if human history were perfectly known) than it would seem to be on the surface.
“Best viewed” by who? I, for instance, best view it as part of a system of economic class warfare wrapped in the legal frippery of (largely imaginary) mutual obligation, functionally no different than working a Roman latifundium, being a Spartan helot, a debt bondsman on a Brazilian fazenda, owing your soul to the Company Store in West Virginia, or anywhere where “the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly”
Could they be sold (with or without the manor?) without a say in the matter? It’s a yes/no question, and if the answer is “yes”, then they were property.
The answer, BTW, is definitely “Yes”
Does the law compel your labour? If not, it’s not a valid comparison.
That’s not compulsion. Lots of people work without paying income tax. You could voluntarily work at that level of income. Or not work at all, depending on welfare systems where you are.
Sales taxes are a different matter, they’re a lot harder to avoid, but again, are not the same as compulsion of labour. For feudal labour, you could not avoid most of them by paying money instead. Actual physical service was what was required.
Personally, I think saying paying taxes are a form of slavery is both disingenuous and pretty insulting to actual slaves. Not least because you derive benefit from paying taxes. Slaves derive no such benefit from their labour for their masters (and I’m including serfs’ so-called mutual obligations here - a literally glorified protection racket is not a benefit)
I’m not saying the systems are the same - obviously, what we have now is much, much better. I’m saying that it’s a sliding scale, (vastly) different degrees of the same basic concept. In short, I agree with Little Nemo, that Feudalism is a form of government, and that Serfs were not property per se, but instead people at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
And I disagree that the serfs got nothing in return for their labor: they got government. A crappy, corrupt, predatory government, but a government nonetheless. They got courts and roads and rudimentary economic planning and walls to hide behind and other things civilization needed in order to exist. In retrospect, it wasn’t that great a system, but it was a system, which is better than no system at all.
Feudal serfs, slaves, etc. It doesn’t matter - the point is, we see slavery through the model of the southern plantation system - as a distinctive separate ethnic group that was considered subhuman by the slave owners and they were treated like cattle.
To my mind this was unique. There were plenty of societies where slaves were as subjugated and devoid of rights, but none I can think of where this was associated with the same determination that the slave race was significantly inferior (beyond the usual jingoistic feelings); certainly few where slaves were exclusively one foreign race.
Most slave societies tended to treat slaves as essentially the equivalent of indentured servants. They lived with the owner, they worked for basically room and board. In many societies they were not looked down on, and in Rome for example, freed slaves and their offspring could aspire to earn citizenship. Slaves could own property save money, even work on the side if their tasks at home were done. In many such societies they even had the right to buy their freedom. (There’s the story of the slaves in Brazil’s gold mines, who realized that when they washed after work, they washed flakes of gold from their hair. Some collected this to buy their freedom.) In many societies, slaves had some rights. All this is at odds with our image of slavery fueled by the plantation models.
Not exactly. The master is only off the hook for the death if the slave was able to stand up under his own power within 24 hours of the beating. If the slave died without ever having enough health to stand up again, the master is liable to the death penalty no matter how many days elapsed.
The key word above is and they decide. If the Israelite slave opts for continued servitude (and that’s whether or not the master had given him a wife), then this arrangement is allowed. He cannot be enslaved indefinitely against his will.
ftg:
That’s specifically with Israelite slaves, though. And the reasoning given is that Israelites are servants of G-d based on the covenant at Sinai, and therefore no human being may consider them to permanently be “his” servant/slave. There’s no such negative view of the institution of slavery in general in the Bible.
But, in the case of a wife and/or children being involved, there would be significant coercion. I don’t think we disagree in general—that the Bible isn’t exactly anti-slavery—and I think those caveats in Exodus that basically lay out how a shrewd master can hope to coerce a male slave (again, the women and children didn’t even have this option open to them) into a lifetime of servitude are important to bring up when someone points to the preceding verse(s) as if to suggest that biblical slavery was no worse than indentured servitude or imprisonment of POWs/criminals.
Possibly. But serfdom and slavery are hard against each other at one end of it, and there’s a lot of scale before you get to modern taxes.
The fact that other people got the same thing without having to do forced labour gives the lie to that notion, IMO.
The court of first recourse for a serf being his owner…can’t see much wrong with that idea :rolleyes:
…that they couldn’t use to travel away without permission…
What? Like they couldn’t think for themselves without their Lord doing it for them?
That sounds like how some people talk about people on welfare today.
Generally not. That’s the difference between living on the manor and living in a city or as a courtier.
False dilemma. The alternative to serfdom was not anarchy, it was a society of free men and voluntary exchange of labour for value. Not something completely unknown, even in that time and place.
Slavery too in some circles. As in, “Plantation life wasn’t so bad. They got fed, they got shelter, and some of the masters even allowed them a degree of self-government (subject to the master’s kindly oversight, of course). Way better than what factory owners provided to Irish immigrants in places like New York, barely scraping by from day to day and never knowing if they’d have work or food tomorrow.”
The usual sort of pro-slavery apologetics.
Not that I think Alessan falls into that category (the pro-slavery or slavery apologist category), but I think it’s informative that the arguments presented in favor of serfdom being unlike slavery in key respects sound an awful lot like the arguments put forth for how slavery “wasn’t so bad.”
Only if the slave gets too attached to them - and more so than to (possibly) the family he had on the outside.
The Torah expects that an Israelite should not feel greater emotional attachment to master-owned slaves than to returning to being a free member of Israelite society, nor to servitude to a human master rather than being answerable only to G-d. But the Torah does understand that human beings can develop non-ideal feelings, and allows one who has developed such attachment to stay enslaved.
Again, it’s the Bible. Interpretations for everything are all over the place. I couched my post in such a way that I was aware of such vagaries.
A post asserting a specific interpretation doesn’t hold much water with me. A lot, and I mean a lot, of people, including experts, will disagree with what you wrote.
Oh, another place where the Bible isn’t so positive about slavery regards the Hebrews in Egypt thing. How they ended up as slaves, how they were treated and what they did about it. And how they continued to remember these events to this day. That makes up a pretty large chunk of the Pentateuch.
Gosh, that’s real compassionate, making allowances for us flawed humans to love our families and so be enslaved with them for our lifetime rather than be split apart. Ain’t choice grand!
Sure, the Bible definitely frowns on MISTREATMENT of slaves, but not necessarily on owning them.
Well, because “they” didn’t do anything about it, G-D freed them, and they’re supposed to remember that, because a special, personal-level relationship with G-d is what the Israelite/Jewish religion is all about. The emphasis is our personal gratitude toward G-d, not simple condemnation of the fact of their slavery in general.
Right: Slavery is unconscionable when it’s part of the origin myth of the favored people. When it’s the favored people doing the enslaving, well, that’s just time and place and as long as you don’t literally beat anyone to death, it isn’t anything a deity would turn your water into blood over. Truly a moral for our times.
And I feel the same way about you comparing serfdom to genuine slavery. It reminds me of the old southern apologists who compared the lives of factory workers in the north to slavery.