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?
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.
I’m going to start using the “single crab alone, clawing in a bucket” analogy to describe our current world.
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.
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.