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If a Great Depression happened again, would people still stand together like they did during the penny auctions? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 day ago by Yezzey@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

171 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] sobchak@programming.dev 16 points 1 day ago

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.