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.
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.
That isn’t true. France, for example, had to pay a larger indemnity after the Franco-Prussian war. It certainly didn’t help but blaming it all on a fairly standard post-war treaty is literally a relic of Nazi propaganda.
These events are interconnected and pretending the Great Depression didn’t affect economies world wide is revisionist nonsense.
???
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.
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
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 drought began 5 years after the market shit itself to death. The farms began struggling after the war.
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.
It was but these penny auctions were mainly a US thing I think
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
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.
Some of us still try to heed our neighbors.
Unfortunately that usually results in all of us, just chilling at the bottom of the pile, because while we were helping eachother, everyone else used us as stepping stones to get closer to the brim.
I’m going to start using the “single crab alone, clawing in a bucket” analogy to describe our current world.
It’s also the difference between individual ownership and company ownership. Companies simply have too much power.
I agree that this could happen as you described because of online bidding & buying. But any new owners and/or renovation crews show up, I think people could make that new purchase WAY most costly. Word would eventually get around and no one would want to accept those jobs.
I think the only way to realistically fight back is if all the tradespeople refuse to work on a foreclosed property.
It’s possible, or the land owners could simply bring in someone from out of state (or province, or whatever it is where you are)…
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.
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.
It certainly never died.
Over time the gap on Justice has only gotten wider. The rich will literally bankrupt someone with legal fees long before any kind of judgement can be enforced; even if they’re completely in the right, they can’t get justice because companies have enough money to throw at the problem that they can effectively ensure that any judgement against them is squashed.
Most will settle out of court at best, so that the whole experience can be over, while the rich barely need to show up for court when they’re charged with anything. Their lawyers take care of everything.
The police are just an extension of the same problem. The whole idea of police has been hostile to the common man from the start. It’s basically boiled down to, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to, then we’re going to fine you money you don’t have. When you fail to pay up, we’re going to throw you in jail.
Even if you can pay, is kept on your record and held against you for years to come. Forget getting decent employment if you’re convicted of any crime.
But the rich are barely affected by any of this. Punishments are usually a joke to them, like, they need to pay a few grand? Sure, in the time they the cop decided to do that, they probably made more money than the fine is, from their investments.
Everything is balanced towards those with money are affected the least, or completely unaffected, when they commit crimes, yet for commoners and poors, we get fucked for the rest of our lives.
This is the system. Working at intended.
…dude half of my neighbors want to see me killed because of things like me refusing to worship that dead neonazi that recently got himself shot in the neck.
They’d buy off my possessions just so they could see my reaction as they set them ablaze.
No, not in my country (US). People will not band together like that again, possibly ever.
Banks have auctions remotely now to prevent this sort of class solidarity.
It absolutely could not happen again, regardless of how organized the community was, because banks simply wouldn’t sell the foreclosed property in an auction of community peers if they weren’t getting good money for it, they’d auction it to REITs and corporations without them needing to set foot in an auction house.
Private equity will buy everything with no public sale.
Indeed, backed by the force of the state no less.
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
No no they’ll get bailouts. Billions in corporate welfare for donating a few million to whatever grift Trump is running at that moment.
God forbid anyone say anything remotely optimistic on here
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.
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.
5 year olds haven’t been fully taught racism yet.
And a 15, 25, 35, 45, 55 year old…
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.
I feel like this too
blackrock would be there with their own paramilitary buying them up for the pennies
Blackrock and blackwater is the entirely plausible and terrifying outcome here.
Just need to incorporate Blackfire and Blackwind first
No chance if possibly only because the government would immediately crack down and boot lickers would refuse to stand up to the capitalists and government.
I think things would be different during a great depression.
Why would that matter to the people on top who can avoid the worst and control the police and government so thoroughly why would they ever allow something “illegal” like this to go unchallenged when they don’t have to.
The mob rules.
Look how divided people are already. If you were close to starving, family suffering, do you think republicans and dems would get along? Not the ones I know, especially republicans. I know several that are ready for a civil war, actually prepping for it. One in particular I no longer associate with is hoping it comes to that.
I believe that we wouldn’t come together because the people at the top wouldn’t want that. They would stir up more drama to try and make the poor fight. That is what it comes down to. Make the poor war with themselves so the rich get ignored with their abuse of society. Always has been, always will be the motivation. Country, time doesn’t matter.
This post had nothing to do with US politics. I believe communities will come together in crisis if shit hits the fan.
I respect your optimism.
I would imagine they just auction them on online nowadays :/ cutting out any sort of human interaction.
Not in the same way. There is still some anti-eviction resistance that goes on today. It’s rare and never successful in undoing evictions though. For the most part, I think the US is too individualistic, and the methods of preventing and breaking solidarity too refined for broad action to be successful. I imagine that during a depression, most desperate people would rather join the feds to feed their family by committing violence against others. Even now, ICE received 150k applications in a single week, and people aren’t anywhere near as desperate as they’d be in a depression. The government would have to basically collapse, and even then we’d probably end up more like the poor countries ruled by gangs and warlords that dangle the possibility of escaping poverty in exchange for extreme violence.
Labor solidarity decreased under Hoover, and only started increasing under FDR with a lot of government support. I’m skeptical we’ll ever have free and fair elections again, so I don’t envision a pro-union government anytime soon.
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
He doesn’t give stuff to people.
It’s an investment to make more money.
Nope. Capitalists would be frothing at the mouth, dick in hand in this situation. Hell they’re doing it now.
There are very reasonable arguments for some people in Trump’s circle that are intentionally wanting a major downsizing of the fed, and an economic collapse so they can buy up a ton of stuff.
I think things would be way different in a great depression.
Why’s that?
Because when everyone’s broke, the whole social network changes. People stop pretending the system works for them and start relying on each other instead.
They can’t. Yhey are fundamentaly broken.
The problem with this is that a lot of these people have been shitting on their neighbors and their entire neighborhoods for decades because they think they are the special snowflake who can survive anything by themselves and don’t need any community.
When those fucks are also broke and they come asking for help a lot of us are going to tell them to get fucked.
Those of us who’ve been building intentional communities and support systems will be a little better off, but we’re going to be wasting a lot of time trying to fight off raiders from the aforementioned group above. thankfully they’ll probably be coming single file because they won’t help each other either.
I’m guessing the noose wasn’t only for the benefit of outsiders. Most communities probably had one or two selfish people.
