cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/54239937
During the Great Depression, when banks foreclosed on farms, neighbors often showed up at the auctions together.
They’d bid only a few cents, and return the land to the family that lost it. Sometimes a noose hung nearby as a warning to outsiders not to profit from someone else’s ruin.
It was rough, but it worked, communities protected each other when the system wouldn’t.
If a collapse like that happened today, do you think people would still stand together or has that kind of solidarity disappeared? Could it happen again?
Mod notice: This post is kinda in the grey area of being in breach of Rule 6, but it’s a good question with decent answers, so it gets to stay.
Stay classy.
Let it stand! I see it as more of a question of how people would react to such a disaster in modern America.
Plus rule 6 is mostly there to prevent this board from being flooded with questions about whatever annoying orange did in the past 24h
Wasn’t the Great Depression a worldwide thing?
Not really, the great depression in capital letters was almost 100% in the US.
The rest of the world had a recession, a bit tougher than normal but nothing near what happen in the US
You are forgetting the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Depression
Their currency collapsed to the point, where a wheelbarrow of cash could not buy a bread.
I would say that is pretty significant.
That mostly has to do with the end of WWI and the reparations they had to pay. It happened near the same time, but not really related.
???
The weymar hiper inflation happened almost 9 years before…
The great US depression was only a drop in a miriad of causes, it is not even in the top 3 of reasons of nazi getting the power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
That’s also partly because they printed a ton of money for reparations for losing the first world war
A story my parents shared with me as a kid, allegedly from somewhere in family history was of an individual taking a wheelbarrow of cash to the store to buy a loaf of bread, heading inside and learning the price had further increased and upon returning outside finding the cash dumped in the street and the wheelbarrow gone since that was the (relative) valueble left unattended.
The US Great Depression directly lead to hyperinflation in Weimar Germany which lead to the rise of National Socialism.
Edit: I was wrong, the hyperinflation was 9 years prior and it was a 30% unemployment rate from the crash which was a leading factor to National Socialism, not hyperinflation.
Part of that was linked to a great drought on US farms caused by overfarming leading to the dust bowl. That was a major part of the US GDP then. And 100 years later people still don’t believe humans can alter the environment.
The US at the time deported Latino citizens due to the increases racism/bigotry. Most of them were farmhands who knew how to work the land, better than the white farmers. The US realized their mistake in the middle of the depression and attempted to woo the same people back under the Vaquero program. The promise of citizenship was never fulfilled by the US.
Nope, it didn’t, the hiper inflation happened almost 9 years before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
Edit: I appreciate your edit, but now mine looks out of touch :)
Seems I mixed up the unemployment from the depression with the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic.
I’ve edited my comment to say this
It was but these penny auctions were mainly a US thing I think
We’ve had worse depressions already. In 08 entire neighborhoods in Reno were totally abandoned, the whole economy seemed to be house construction and repair. At night whole neighborhoods would vanish, not a single light turning on. I knew guys in construction that suddenly couldn’t get work and went around in crews and stripped foreclosed houses of materials to resell or use on lowball job bids, I knew a pretty well off contractor with an adult disabled son who turned to pushing pyramid schemes to try and stay alive basically. I ended up living in an abandoned house for months looking for work. Between the dot Com crash and the housing market bubble my family went from poor to middle class to hoping to survive winter. I remember my dad telling me in an interview they asked him why he changed careers twice and him just laughing like ‘‘you haven’t been in town long then’’ boom and bust. That’s been the nature of things. I still have health problems from getting pneumonia that year when I was basically homeless, I had a friend drag me to a clinic to get penicillin, the doctor had me wait around a few hours so he could have multiple med students come examine me, he had never seen anyone with that advanced of a case in his whole career. And I’m lucky, I know multiple people in their 20s like me at the time that died that winter because they refused to go to the hospital. They knew they couldn’t pay and didn’t want collections. I ended up getting a medical debt bankruptcy a few years later. You live through this and on the news they say things like ‘‘economic recession’’ and ‘‘down turn’’ maybe ‘‘soft raise in unemployment’’ like they guys who used to sign my paychecks were calling me asking if I heard about any work, standing next to me in the clinic line with sunken eyes.
I will say, at that time people were very open handed, you never needed to call someone to help you get your car out of the road, people would jump out and push you to the side, even put some gas in your tank to get home, I used to drive around with gas cans and a tow line especially in the snow, I used to have sand bags too, people would bend over backwards in a second when they saw your situation, it was a time of a lot of social closeness. And no one ever asked in you had a damm job. My god. No one ever said that shit. ‘‘Get a job?’’ Someone might shoot you for that.
I don’t know that those small family farms are really a thing anymore. I think those pretty much went away in the 80s.
Unequivocally no.
We live in an era of being able to buy things, sight-unseen. In that era, there was no way for an investor to bid without physically showing up, so if they did, and aggressively outbid everyone else, then they already have a noose set up for them.
Now? People don’t need to be at the auction in person, there probably wouldn’t be an auction to begin with. The Bank would hire a real estate agent, who would pass it off to whomever makes the highest bid. Simple as that.
I’d like to think we would, as communities, as a society, but in this society is also money hungry, faceless corporations that will do whatever they can to make a dollar. There are so many layers of obfuscation between the person who is buying the property, and the person who ultimately owns it.
I just can’t see it happening with the Internet.
Society doesn’t exist anymore. Capitalism has atomized us all into individual crabs, clawing to get out of the pot, paying no heed to who we drag down in our struggles.
I’m going to start using the “single crab alone, clawing in a bucket” analogy to describe our current world.
Yeah, the bloated police state and anonymity of most real estate moguls makes this is logistically impossible. That being said, the reaction to the United Healthcare CEO’s killing and the number of ICE, “assaults,” that can’t get grand jury indictments makes me think this spirit is still alive.
I just can’t see it happening with the Internet.
This, even without the technological forces of capital swooping in to take advantage of every leveraged opportunity, even if people did rally together it would just turn into a political/performative circus and the entire thing will get lost and buried under some streamer drama that erupts from it.
Honestly, this is why I fled suburbia for someplace more integrated and communal.
I looked around and realized that I barely knew who lived there, and nobody had my back. Likewise, if someone was in trouble, I would never hear about it. I’m not unfriendly by any means, it’s just the whole tract-housing setup with no communal space is practically engineered to divide people up. Heap work hours and commute time on top of that, and all you know is someone keeps a car in so many driveways overnight; you never see any people. Everyone there really kept to themselves, as the environment made that easy to do.
I’m happy to say that I’m in a place now that would likely band together if it came down to it.
Private equity will buy everything with no public sale.
Assuming they don’t completely collapse on their own due to their bad investments. This might actually happen from how things are going. Unfortunately, it’ll also kick off a larger recession/depression
Indeed, backed by the force of the state no less.
Most likely no. People nowadays have no empathy. Don’t care about others. No unity.
They are doing this in some areas. Little Tokyo in Los Angeles had a whole bunch of people buy out buildings so rent wouldn’t go up and they could subsidiZe some of the older standing businesses. Humans are still mostly good.
Banks have auctions remotely now to prevent this sort of class solidarity.
Absolutely not, there’d be some TikTok influencer that would be like “Broooo you can get land so cheap!” and buy it all and sell it for massive profit.
Or Mr Beast would buy it and give it back while looking like an animatronic wearing a dead face.
He likes views, he’d make the farmer do some stupid challenge to win back some portion of the land, selling off whatever the farmer couldn’t “win”
I don’t really know what he does, except that he gives stuff to people. That’s the full content of my Mr Beast file. That and a mugshot.
Less “he gives people stuff” and more “he exploits peoples desperation for views.”
I watched part of one video a few years ago because the title said something about crashing a train and I just wanted to see what kind of equipment they were destroying and how they managed safety. Instead my main takeaways were
- The videos have such insanely fast pacing I needed a proper break from the screen after skipping through a few minutes of it
- They had some guy spending shitloads of money to try to protect a pile of cash from a pile of explosives (and whatever cash he protected he got to keep), also dubious on safety but with the way they edited and of course basic knowledge of explosive safety (such as, everybody stay away from the explosives and don’t leave random explosives lying around in disorganized piles), I’m guessing the pile of explosives was entirely digital
- The train was in fact nothing special. Just some old equipment from the 80s that already have some examples in preservation. Also I’m guessing they weren’t aware that most American trains do not have much in the way of crumple zones due to FRA regulations because they really set it up for what would be an impressive crash for a car which is built with tons of crumple zones and instead the train got dented up as it bounced
No, because farmers knew each other back then and it was a society transitioning from agrarian to fully industrial. Different values.
They also had a connection to reality that we don’t have, they used their hands directly on physical objects, we all think we’re Johnny Mnemonic (ever see those stupid SAS vaiya or whatever ads?).
Correct as all the negative comments may be, I really think we can’t know what shape it would take. Things change quickly when people get hungry. Only class consciousness can save us.
Absolutely not. Americans are now scumbags to each other. Especially after how they monetized homes and turned them into reality tv shows. About how the take an affordable home and make it unaffordable. Scumbag Americans will fuck each other over.
Scumbag murican checking in: The difference between a 65 year old and a 5 year old is nearly non-existent nowadays. Xenophobia is a hell of a drug.
In my experience young children are the most empathetic and caring people. Its surprising (also why lord of the flies is a stupid story).
Until they get parented by magats and sent to school.
5 year olds haven’t been fully taught racism yet.
And a 15, 25, 35, 45, 55 year old…
I feel like this too
Nope, “Gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps”.
The USA is no longer the USA because the core values of people who wear and live by the flag have changed. Sure, the core values of the people profiting off of them hasn’t changed, but they have made sure to twist the values of the rest of society for the last couple of decades or so.
After decades of pushing individualism, not a chance.
