Matt Silberstein wrote:

On 18 Dec 2005 05:56:47 -0800, in alt.atheism ,
"pbamvv@worldonline.nl" <pbamvv@worldonline.nl> in
<1134914207.121876.210950@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> wrote:

Don't forget the mediavel serfs (lijfeigenen),
they were factually slaves too.

No, they were not. Feudalism is by no means an egalitarian paradise,
but neither was it slavery. Western European serfs were tied to the
land, but they could not be bought or sold. The whole notion of
property and ownership and rights and obligations were different, of
course, and serfs were certainly oppressed. But they had legal rights,
their lords had obligations to them, etc. Eastern European/Russian
serfs, so to speak, were in a different position, but it still was not
slavery.

There are two rights that a slave owner has that those people did not
have (legal rights, factual power is a different issue). A slave owner
can break up families by selling off people and a slave owner can
summarily kill a slave.

Not entirely true. Slave owners in most of the antebellum South, for
instance, were not legally permitted to kill their slaves for no reason,
although there were seldom any consequences if they did. In many
places, including Spanish South America, there were legal restrictions
on breaking up slave families. Russian serfs, on the other hand, were
entirely under the control of their masters, and could be killed and
even sold apart from the land they worked. There's never been a clear
line between slavery and other forms of forced labor.