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?
Black Rock will take it all. Already is
This is being done today. In my area. But it produces the opposite results you may seek.
There is a community near me. Very insular. It hits the national news every so often, but is always top of mind in my region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_Square%2C_New_York
You may have heard of the issues with the East Ramapo school district. I’ll let others fill in those stories. Or you can search area news articles for the past 20 years.
My story goes like this: a community member stopped paying taxes. The property goes for auction. A neighbor buys for pennies because there is only one bidder. The bidder moves into the property and stops paying taxes on his first home. That goes to auction and the first party buys for pennies. And it goes around the entire community. Endlessly. Perfectly legal tax evasion.
One day, a developer scans the foreclosure pages and sees a property for sale. Except he doesn’t know the unwritten rules. So he purchases the place for a song. The community leaves some clear messages that he needs to walk away. He doesn’t get the hint.
One peaceful night, the 911 switchboard lights up. There are shootouts, break-ins, fires, domestic disturbances all over the area. But all are nowhere near the property.
With every first responder in the area tied up, the community got to work demolishing the home - by hand. They took that place apart with crowbars and handsaws in a few hours.
There were no witnesses.
And so the developer walked away. The situation continues to this day. Nearby folks trying to get a rational price to sell their home are assured by a visitor that there will be precisely ONE offer - that they should not refuse.
Lockstep communities are not always a good thing.
I mean that in the good kind of way, the kind that still believes people can pull together when things fall apart.
I agree. But the line can be difficult to see. Pulling together should be on the lookout for excluding others.
well it probably doesn’t matter, since corporations are the ones buying it all up and you really can’t intimidate those soulless bastards
If a community decides the opposite it doesn’t matter.
No, propaganda would convince them standing together is ‘woke’.
Also bots would insta-win any auctions by outbidding any human beings.
They’d try, but there will be corporations bidding from thousands of miles away completely out of reach of any mob action these days.
If we reach penny auction status (and we will), it will be back to functional feudalism for most.
At that point the community can just refuse to recognize the sale and not let the company onto the property after the sale. The key to these kinds of protests is to make the fight unprofitable.
Yea, which will work for about 30 minutes until the police show up, who are already used to defending property over lives.
The government doesn’t have to be profitable. That’s part of socializing business cost, just like how many people that work at walmart are on food stamps. A corrupt government loves to subsidize the rich.
You talk like people couldn’t just escalate further when they absolutely could. Need people to stop undermining collective action with their pessimism
all it takes is a single call from the buyer and the place will be swatted
Exactly what i was thinking
Everything is a lot more urban now, which is a big thing that would get in the way. A farmer in the great depression would have been seeing and getting to know their neighbors a damn lot, and outsiders couldn’t exactly take a rip out on a highway to bid either.
I like you ask in hypotheticals.
Resist now.
Hypotheticals are safer than regrets.
Unfortunately the problem now is corporations are people now and the rest of us are just commodities and slaves.
In the vast majority of cases, certainly not. Anybody putting up any sort of threat will be… Policed. Anybody pretending they didn’t just lose everything - by design - will be policed. There’s a chance some people will be retroactively policed for making posts like this.
Community land (especially farm land) has been pillaged by corporations and private interest already.
No, the corporations learned their lessons from back then and they’ve successfully divided us along ideological or other lines, rather than class. In fact they’ve tried to fully erase class consciousness and I’d say they sadly succeeded.
You mean the one with the national guard and ice out front with automatic weapons and hatred?
Harder to get away with murder these days and how you gonna hang a whole corporation?
Start with the boardroom?
Lol, these days Trump would personally show up to take everyone’s land after they underbid and they’d convince themselves it’s a good thing somehow
How can we penny auction without pennies?
