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?
I don’t think the same mechanism would work these days, but we have seen people standing up to authorities on their neighbors’ behalf already; often people they don’t even know. Look at all the videos of people driving ICE away.
It doesn’t happen every time of course, but neither did the penny auction solidarity.