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?
Do you have a source for your claim? I just happened to study this as an economics/history undergrad. There’s a lot of disagreement.
At the time, “everyone knew” that it was the speculators on Wall Street who’ve caused it.
Now, how much truth is there to that - when in reality we know that a bunch of things contributed in a major way, like the Smoot-Hawley tariff (doesn’t that sound familiar?), gold standard policy fuckery, and so on - doesn’t matter. What matters from this perspective is that the people at the time didn’t blame each other. There wasn’t really a major political division that could or would be blamed.
This is a stark contrast with today’s situation where 1/3 to 2/3 of the country is directly responsible for electing the orange turdsack who caused the crash (depending on if you blame those who didn’t bother to vote).