The Off Topic Topic

[Razgovory]

A slave could be bought and sold.  The relationship was entirely one-way and there was no even implicit social contract.  Serfs owed their liege their labor (within the implicit or explicit contract) but couldn't be bought or sold except when the land they were bound to was bought and sold.  Subsistence wage workers were more like serfs.  There's not really a continuum; slavery was different in form and substance from serfdom or wage slavery.

Tom lives on an island with 10 slaves he brought with him.  He and the slaves are the only people there. The rest of the world has abolished slavery except on Tom's island.  Tom can no longer sell his slaves because there is no one to sell them to.  Are Tom's slaves still slaves?

[Eddie Teach]

Couldn't someone hypothetically come to Tom's island, buy his slaves and settle there?

[The Brain]

Couldn't someone hypothetically come to Tom's island, buy his slaves and settle there?

No. Neither could Tom free a slave and sell him a slave.

[crazy canuck]

It is great that young black girls can see such pictures. You can see her thinking, "if I also marry a man who is going to the top, and do lots of bicep and tricep workouts, I too may have a giant picture on the wall!"

You are projecting 

[grumbler]

Serfs could be bought and sold in some places, such as Russia prior to the emancipation of the serfs, without a land purchase; they were indeed in some ways (but not all) like property, in that you could use them as collateral against loans. Indeed, the famous novel "Dead Souls" relies on that fact to a great extent.

Technically, the landowners were not "selling" the landless serfs; they were transferring the feudal obligations of serf and liege to a new liege (who was supposed to be in a better position to care for the serf as a liege).  The practice, of course, became corrupted into de facto sales and purchases, not supposed improvements in the life of the serfs.

Unless we are playing no-true-Scotsman type definitional games in which Russian serfs are not "really" serfs, but slaves, Russian serfdom looks more *like* chattel slavery and less like subsistence workers - in short, it's a continuum. Serfs in Russia were more "like" slaves than other forms of serfdom but were not slaves, because they had some (highly theoretical) rights.

I'm not going to play words games with you.  If Russian serfs look enough like slaves to you that you think that they are slaves, then that's peachy.  Your assertion that there is no difference between Russian serfs and slaves other than being on different positions on some sort of a continuum is an argument by assertion.  Kinda makes you wonder why Russia itself distinguished between slaves and serfs.

[Valmy]

That's what being on a continuum means - some things are further along the line towards X, and others further along the line towards Y.

X being "owned exactly like an other property, no rights whatsoever", Y being "work for a living or be poor".

Russian serfdom was further along the line towards "X": in many ways they were like property, but they still had some rights: you couldn't do literally whatever you wanted with them.

In contrast, one could take the position that it was binary, not a continuum - that some factor makes the situation very clearly "slavery". If that factor is 'total ownership, exactly like property', then Russian serfs were not "slaves". Indeed, they aren't called 'slaves' and Russia had at one point, both 'slaves' and 'serfs' - so clearly the Russians at least thought there was some distinction between them.

I get it but 'serfdom' is generally not considered a good thing and does describe a situation that most people would regard as negative and something very similar to slavery. It seems reductive to simply eliminate these distinctions and instead designate one word, slavery, to be the word to describe all forced labor situations as slavery on some sort of continuum.

I mean we pay taxes, so we spend a large percentage of our time at our jobs working for nothing and we are forced to do so. I mean essentially that is identical to what many peasants had to do, except in labor or kind. Does this put us all on the 'slave continuum' if you are going to create such a thing? It seems to me that is a consequence of having such a broad and ill defined definition.

I do not understand the point of putting chattel slavery out there. The entire point of slavery is that one is chattel.

That's the binary definition thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

Under that definition, debt bondage (for example) wouldn't be "slavery", and the sentence "It is the most widespread form of slavery today" would be quite incorrect.

I just want to point out that conscription is used as an example of slavery in that article. It seems like you can go pretty off into the weeds once you start trying to define every coerced labor situation as 'slavery'. In order for it to be slavery I thought there had to be a social component to go with it, not only did you not own your own labor but you had a social vulnerability because you are not considered a person. That is what makes it such a horror even when you are a fairly well treated slave with a cushy job like Julius Caesar's cook or something. But slavery is not the only coercive and horrible labor situation. Or, at least I didn't think it was.

But clearly I am in the minority on this, so I concede. But I find it a bit...confusing. I mean coercive forces are everywhere in society, it makes it seem like a fairly arbitrary term. And, as you can probably tell, arbitrary terms, especially ones with the sort of emotive and political heft as 'slavery', are not to my liking 

[Oexmelin]

I do not understand the point of putting chattel slavery out there. The entire point of slavery is that one is chattel.

No, it's not. Chattel slavery is only one form of slavery, which does not fit well American Indigenous slavery, most forms of African slavery (in Africa), even the early forms of European slavery (16th c.) - and there are debates about how well it fits Ancient slavery as well. Chattel slavery doesn't really explain high status slaves, debt peonage, armed slaves, urban slavery, etc.

18th and 19th century version of chattel slavery has come to define what slavery is "supposed" to mean, which is in turn projected to other time periods and places. 

[Valmy]

I do not understand the point of putting chattel slavery out there. The entire point of slavery is that one is chattel.

No, it's not. Chattel slavery is only one form of slavery, which does not fit well American Indigenous slavery, most forms of African slavery (in Africa), even the early forms of European slavery (16th c.) - and there are debates about how well it fits Ancient slavery as well. Chattel slavery doesn't really explain high status slaves, debt peonage, armed slaves, urban slavery, etc.

18th and 19th century version of chattel slavery has come to define what slavery is "supposed" to mean, which is in turn projected to other time periods and places. 

All those slaves had masters did they not? I mean people were being sold as slaves in markets, were they not? What about 'chattel slavery' is so limiting that it cannot cover those situations?

[Oexmelin]

Relations between humans can be problematic without being slavery. Slavery refers to not just an economic burden but also the issue of being a non-person, a piece of property, and all the vulnerability that goes with it..

Vulnerability is certainly a fundamental part of the equation - but in many forms of slavery, the slave is emphatically not a "non-person". That is what makes its value. Even in contemporary Atlantic slave regimes (French, British, Spanish, Portuguese), there were many gradation of recognized autonomy. As for property I am willing to bet that once you start scratching the surface, one would find similar problems in defining what that means.

[The Brain]

Can the rhythm even own things? Let alone a person?

[Oexmelin]

All those slaves had masters did they not? I mean people were being sold as slaves in markets, were they not? What about 'chattel slavery' is so limiting that it cannot cover those situations?

Yes: and how would you define the master? Someone who had authority over them? But then, there were dozens and dozens of situations where people had masters who could constrain them into doing what they wanted.

As for markets, no. There were no slave markets in Indigenous North America, for instance, nor in most of Sub-Saharan Africa (with the potential exception of Zanzibar)- that I am aware of - before the rise of Atlantic slavery.

Chattel slavery is the specific interaction of slavery with commodification - i.e., it is precisely the "reducing" of slavery to a mass commerce, in a world increasingly "material". It's the result of changing conceptions of both "slavery" and "things". Introducing the distinction of chattel slavery is a way to insist upon the fact that slavery is not ahistorical, and unchanging, i.e., that slaves were not always considered as "chattel", or as "things", or as "goods" to be commodified.

[crazy canuck]

It was not that long ago that employment law was referred to as the law of Master and Servant.

[Valmy]

All those slaves had masters did they not? I mean people were being sold as slaves in markets, were they not? What about 'chattel slavery' is so limiting that it cannot cover those situations?

Yes: and how would you define the master? Someone who had authority over them? But then, there were dozens and dozens of situations where people had masters who could constrain them into doing what they wanted.

As for markets, no. There were no slave markets in Indigenous North America, for instance, nor in most of Sub-Saharan Africa (with the potential exception of Zanzibar)- that I am aware of - before the rise of Atlantic slavery.

Chattel slavery is the specific interaction of slavery with commodification - i.e., it is precisely the "reducing" of slavery to a mass commerce, in a world increasingly "material". It's the result of changing conceptions of both "slavery" and "things". Introducing the distinction of chattel slavery is a way to insist upon the fact that slavery is not ahistorical, and unchanging, i.e., that slaves were not always considered as "chattel", or as "things", or as "goods" to be commodified.

Ok I should not have used the term 'master'. Owner then. Somebody owns those people. If they are not owned then in what sense are they slaves?

Venice became powerful by selling slaves to the Egyptians and Byzantines and others did they not? How are those not 'goods' or 'things'?

[grumbler]

As for markets, no. There were no slave markets in Indigenous North America, for instance, nor in most of Sub-Saharan Africa (with the potential exception of Zanzibar)- that I am aware of - before the rise of Atlantic slavery.

There was a thriving East African slave trade from the 7th Century onward.  they certainly had markets, just not in Zanzibar.  Zanzibar, in fact, wasn't a huge market until the 19th C, as I recall.

[Malthus]

Serfs could be bought and sold in some places, such as Russia prior to the emancipation of the serfs, without a land purchase; they were indeed in some ways (but not all) like property, in that you could use them as collateral against loans. Indeed, the famous novel "Dead Souls" relies on that fact to a great extent.

Technically, the landowners were not "selling" the landless serfs; they were transferring the feudal obligations of serf and liege to a new liege (who was supposed to be in a better position to care for the serf as a liege).  The practice, of course, became corrupted into de facto sales and purchases, not supposed improvements in the life of the serfs.

Unless we are playing no-true-Scotsman type definitional games in which Russian serfs are not "really" serfs, but slaves, Russian serfdom looks more *like* chattel slavery and less like subsistence workers - in short, it's a continuum. Serfs in Russia were more "like" slaves than other forms of serfdom but were not slaves, because they had some (highly theoretical) rights.

I'm not going to play words games with you.  If Russian serfs look enough like slaves to you that you think that they are slaves, then that's peachy.  Your assertion that there is no difference between Russian serfs and slaves other than being on different positions on some sort of a continuum is an argument by assertion.  Kinda makes you wonder why Russia itself distinguished between slaves and serfs.

I'm making a rather different assertion though: that there is a continuum of labor relations, with "completely unfree" at one end (workers legally owned exactly like any other object, without any rights of their own), and "completely free" at the other; and that it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to point to any single place along that spectrum, on one side of which you get "slavery" and on the other side "not slavery".

After all, things like debt peonage, Russian serfdom, Russian slavery, forced prostitution, Nazi concentration camp workers, etc. all could be (and sometimes are) commonly termed "slavery", despite having different characteristics.

Your own suggested hard binary decision - that of being bought and sold - doesn't work very well as a distinguishing feature; as noted, Russian serfs could be, and yet they were distinguished (in Russia at least) from "slaves". Forced sex workers typically can't be "legally" bought or sold, yet they can be called "slaves". Concentration camp workers could not normally be sold (until the end of the war, when some were in effect ransomed) as they were prisoners of the state; they were supposed to be worked to death (if Jews, Gypsies, gays, etc.) - yet they could be called "slaves" with legitimacy, too. 

My own suggestion is that "slavery" really means no more these days than "unfree labor, unfree because of a structure that one wishes to point out has an entirely negative connotation". Unlike (say) "conscription", "prison reform work", "labor tax", etc. which are all ways of saying "unfree labor, unfree because of a structure with a more positive connotation".  Attempting a precise and exact definition, and you will tend to be either forced to declare certain things that are not usually considered slavery to be "really slavery" (as in the Russian serf example), or on the other hand, to declare things that are usually thought to be slavery as "not really slavery".

Certainly it is possible to declare that chattel slavery is the only "real" type of slavery, that others are different flavours of unfree labor, but I think that suffers from the problem identified: and moreover, it's a structure reasonably limited in time and place. Chattel slavery hardly exists legally anywhere any more, but nasty, negative types of unfree labor which can be, and are, termed "slavery" still thrive.