Not really. Most people in that situation worked on what was available that paid, and then retired with a grown up family successfully provided for. That's not a serf.
Most people over the last 500 years _absolutely did not retire_. But in any case I think the general idea holds; prior to the 20th century, for the _vast_ majority of people, even in developed nations, the course of their life was pretty much laid out at birth by their social station. They weren't literally serfs, usually, but in practice they'd be doing what their parents and their parents' parents did, usually agriculture. This _started_ changing in the 19th century, but the really big shift was in the 20th.
Depends on what counts as freedom and serfdom. I'm sure many serfs in middle ages were fairly content with their lives and how free they are. Such is life an human nature. Best walls are the ones you are not even sure if they are there. Less reasons for you to seek the ways around them.
"Serf" isn't synonymous with "person who has to work". It's a specific condition. There's no point renaming things; just say what they are.
For example: if you wish food, shelter, sanitation, water, etc all sprang into existence spontaneously, or that you had slaves to do things for you, then say that. If you don't think either of those things, and, say, we all need to work to provide value to exchange with others to create a life, then that would be approximately what we have today. That's not serfdom.
Right, but when serfdom was abolished and people were free to move, some of them were forced to move looking for work and poorer because of that. So were they more free? Just because they were not attached to their land? Or were they less free because they had less and nobody anylonger cared if they live or die?
We are also attached to land. Just a bigger piece of land. I can't freely move to work anywhere on the planet.
Maybe fair to say that the most we can say is that one form of unfreadom was replaced by another form of unfreadom. Along the lines of - is "freedom to starve" a freedom, how much freedom, and is a +ve or a -ve freedom? I think this is a ongoing and long discussion with not a final straightforward answer. In philosophy that is. It maybe that the technology provides an answer by creating new reality at some point.
