What's the difference between slavery and serfdom?

slaves: kept on the land with whips and shackles
serfs: kept on the land by the fact everywhere else is just as impoverished and all they'd succeed in doing is starving somewhere else

slaves were expensive it was like keying your own car

Agency.

Serfs were legally bound

In early and high medieval Europe both institutions existed at the same time. A serf is a landless farmer who gets to work the lords lands. He has certain personal rights, can own property and cattle and is seen as a legal person belonging to the estate and falling under its justice. So a serf was not free, but he was a person.
As a lord you couldn't sell them, you had to provide them with land to work and protection and in exchange the serf payed part of his harvest plus several days of bonded labor.

Slaves where different, often taken from Slavic tribes (hence the name) where bought and sold over Europe, the slave market of Verdun being famous, and including a castration institute in case you needed Enuchs. Now slaves had the state of cattle, you could buy and sell them and treat them every which way you saw fit. So legally they are not even persons.

This does not apply to all forms of serfdom, for example 18th century Russia is way different.

serfdom or patriarchal slavery

Is the Tale of the Slave bullshit?

>Consider the following sequence of cases... and imagine it is about you.

>There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master's whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.

>The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.

>The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.

>The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.

>The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.

>The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.

cont...

>you can live a free life as long as you dont try to escape
:DD

>Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers.

>In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.)

>They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome.

>The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave?"

>Being able to walk down the road for some bread and being chained to a wall are the same thing!!!

slave families can be split up and then be sold, serfs wher kinda bound to their family

It's all slavery until the slaves also own the means of production at their places of employment.

>there are numerous examples duing the French Revolution where the serfs
It would be pretty hard cause serfdom died out in France in the 12-13th century BC

Slave is tied to an owner while a serf is tied to the land.

why?

Slavery is the lawful ownership of a “person”

Serfdom is the legal entitlement to a person’s labor

>What legal limits existed in the Antebellum south? Between 1800 and 1860, for instance?

really limited to the market prices for slaves. There were estates that owned hundreds, or even thousands of slaves but that costs money, buying a slave in 1840 was comparable to buying a small house, so the limits were really the purchaser's wallet.

>Was there a set amount you could whip your slaves?

Slaves were an investment, so it was in the owner's best interest to keep them strong and healthy so that they can work and receive a return on the money spent purchasing, housing, and feeding them. Whipping them until they were crippled or damn near death simply practiced because to it would just be lost money if you did.

>Was there a standard you had to provide for them?
again, it was up the owner's interest in keeping them healthy enough to turn over a profit. so being well fed and clothed was generally in their interest. Slave owners who starved their property or had them freeze to death with no housing went bankrupt very quickly.

>Was there a limit on how many you could own?

not sure, I'll have to look up this one but but slave owners didn't own but 1 or 2, with extremely large estates and plantations having their slaves number in the hundreds.

>Was there maximum amount of how much work you could make them do?

I don't believe there was a set amount, but the accepted work schedule of the time was from sunup to sundown on weekdays, about half that time for Saturdays, and for the most part were off on Sundays.

Whipping, torturing and murdering slaves is a meme. From a practical viewpoint it made no sense, it would be like buying a new Lamborghini and then smashing it with a jackhammer. Sure there's a handful of retards who would do such a thing but 99% of people would not.

Serfs are "free" but tied to the land. They can effectively do whatever they want as long as the crops come in and go to the landowner. Slave have zero freedom and if they have any it's completely at the discretion of their owner. The best comparison is between farm animals in free range (can do as they wish relatively speaking, but gonna get slaughtered/milked regardless) and farm animals in factory farms (can't do dick but eat and wait to die)

lol no. Louis XVI had to declare it abolished in 1780 or something, and no one followed.

Eeeh he ain't wrong. "Personnal" serfdom, so to speak, was pretty much dead, except in the colonies, and had been dead for a couple centuries at this point.

>Whipping, torturing and murdering slaves is a meme.

Are you serious. There's a reason places had laws to give slave rights or to make the restrict actions of owners who may have tendency to abuse.

Also we have lot of known case and testimony of slave abuse occuring

Serfdom (as in peasants being bound to the land) had been ended for centuries, but the various different courts and ancient debts still existed until they were abolished in august 1789

Yeah but that wasn't really serfdom as we knew it in Russia.