I absolutely agree there are better forms of government. But to repeat my argument from earlier, people living in China have an oppressive government - but they’re not slaves.
Depending on the factory, it was comparableto slavery.
But hey, a child making 50c for a ten-hour day and constant risk of death and injury, that’s just like you working to pay taxes…
I agree (mostly - there’s still forms of slavery in China) but that isn’t my point - saying “but at least serfs had a government” is not a positive. They’d have had a government of some sort regardless. Having a government doesn’t *necessitate *serfdom.
I still think you’re trivializing slavery.
From a theoretical standpoint, one might make the argument. This gets well into GD territory but, I think, the key difference is the psychological impact.
If you were untouchable or eta in Asia, for example, you are being told every day of your life that you’re unclean, disgusting, and vile. And while I haven’t seen any first person accounts from someone in that class, I would have to imagine that being treated in that way takes its toll on you and how you look at the world.
A serf, in Europe, might be forced to marry someone that they don’t want to by their master, they might be whipped for not working or not producing what product was demanded, etc. all based simply on the whims of the master. But society and their overlords still largely viewed them as adults. The Lord of the land is more like a mayor than like a dad or a jailor.
I don’t know what medieval slavery was like, so I can’t much opine on how the experience would have differed there. But with American slavery you’re getting all your meals, you’re being whipped for not working, and so on, but you’re probably being whipped more and with less a sense of being treated like a human. You’re being whipped in the way that an animal is whipped for misbehaving rather than as an adult who has broken a decree. If you’re a woman, your body is being used as a fleshlight - you’re just a mildly aware object that’s warm. Your owners view you and train you to think of yourself as a child or beast of burden rather than as a human being with all the same abilities and potential of any other human.
Imagine living your while life being told that you’re only able to develop to the level of a 5 year old, and being treated as though that were so.
Food and shelter, corporal punishment, etc. all be as it may, the way that society treats you and tells you to view yourself is quite arguably (IMO) to have been the most damaging aspect. I would expect that to be the key factor of differentiation between serfs and slaves.
And while it may be that, in history, some slaves in some societies were teachers and well respected. Of course, the Lord probably could and did whip or beat those people as well, if they weren’t showing proper respect. Older societies were strange. Respect and immunity from suddenly finding yourself being treated like a child were not correlated.
Some sex slaves might have been more like living fleshlights in the eyes of their owner, and lived their lives viewing themselves as having no value except to have their body used. Others, in other societies, might have been more like concubines with the chance to hold a somewhat meaningful position within the court.
You would really need to narrow down to a specific situation and try to wrap your brain around the differences in culture and how that might impact you. Judging how people would have felt about things based on how we would in modern day is probably misleading - like thinking about Roman sexuality in terms of gay vs straight instead of receiver vs giver. Having not lived in a strongly class-based society, it’s probably hard to envision how the people would have interpreted things like this. But we can certainly say, knowing that human beings are all capable of holding the same level of respectability as any other person of any race or gender, that it was supremely fucked up that our ancestors convinced probably 99% of the population that they were inherently capped out at a certain level, punished them in all cases where someone argued otherwise, and yet that it was all just arbitrary.
There’s no such thing as “genuine slavery.”
What you mean is “chattel slavery,” which is one particular (and particularly egregious) form of forced labor. But not the only kind. Not by far. And it’s not trivial to differentiate between different forms of forced labor.
If anything is problematic, it’s saying that chattel slavery is the only “genuine slavery,” because it’s the only form of slavery which has been more or less eliminated from society. All the other kinds are still going strong, all over the world.
I think you’re trivializing serfdom.
Once again, where I’m coming from - I’m a Lumper. As far as I see it, there’s 2 broad categories of people - Worker, and Parasite, and it only serves the interests of the Parasites for Workers to subdivide themselves into groupings defined by picayune distinctions (Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux) when the only distinction that matters is whether you are free or not.
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans!
One thing - when I’m saying “slavery”, I do mean slavery as the whole institution, ancient and modern, but when I said feudalism was basically a rebranding of slavery, I mean *specifically *of the old Roman estate slavery. So, not American chattel slavery specifically, which was at the shittier end of the slavery spectrum (but still not Congo Free State- or Roman mines-level bad)
I fail to see what that has to do with anything.
Children are all children, ergo there’s no difference between cutting the feet off some to make stew of and not others. It’s all the same diff since they’re all in the same lump.
I presume (or at least hope) that’s not your stance, but I’m not seeing how to get from what you said to some argument that makes sense to the topic.
To view this as unique you must be ignoring the realities of slavery in South America, which definitely was implemented along racial lines, and involved far more people being treated generally much more brutally.
Moderator Action
This has strayed out of GQ territory. Since the OP has been pretty well covered factually, instead of trying to steer this thread back into GQ territory, I am going to move it to GD instead.
Moving thread from GQ to GD.
Sorry, what the fuck is that stupid analogy supposed to even mean?
I think in several previous posts I referred to the tropical Americas model of slavery, not just the US south. But yes, there are degrees - the sugar plantations of the Caribbean were notorious for working slaves to death in a matter of years.
Whereas, the problem with southern cotton plantations was the opposite. there was little to do for months, then there was the cotton harvest which apparently was a dirty hellish job - something I read said “cotton-pickin’ hands” referre to the fact cotton was sharp and prickly and fingers got covered with painful bloody pricks and became heavily calloused very quickly. No free men wanted to wait around unpaid for 8 months and then do such crappy work.
The distinction is that slavery in different societies and conditions ranged from basically free live-in servants with room and board, to badly mistreated human cattle. Roman slaves could own property, save money, buy their freedom, eventually become citizens. They were essentially humans with a different living arrangement. It should be no surprise that some social models accepted additional provisos, such as freedom after 7 years.
The tropical Americas model relied on the concept that black Africans were subhuman, mentally unfit, and suited only to be treated as cattle. It was based on the premise that if the ruling class repeated this often enough to themselves, it would become true. (Needless to say, the Dred Scott case showed that this was not the case for many white people, regardless what the courts decided. Dred Scott was left in charge of property management for his mistress.).
Neither model is desirable, but both are not the same.
Not ALL Roman Slaves…
Sage Rat: You said something that makes no sense. It sounds like <thing that makes no sense>
MrDibble: That makes no sense. WTF?
Sage Rat: Yes.
OK, just commenting to be heard, I get it now.
What I said made perfect sense. Even the French bits.
I have no problem with that. I think that the suffering a serf experienced, while it certainly existed, was trivial in comparison to the suffering a slave endured.
Keep in mind that when you say that serfdom was as bad as slavery, you’re also saying that slavery was no worse than serfdom.
We don’t have a lord. We’re an autonomous collective. We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more…
No, I’m asking what does “there are only two kinds of people: Crooks and Joe-blows” have to do with “serfs were treated better than slaves”? I genuinely fail to see the relationship between these two statements, let alone how one is somehow an argument against the other.
I’m not doubting that you’re making an argument, I’m simply saying that I’m not following.
You sure you want to go with “trivial”?
Overall, collectively, I’m saying they’re not really distinguishable in any way that matters. So yes, I *am *saying that.