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?
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
I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m saying don’t expect easy answers like the post implies.
I thought the same thing at first. However after reading another comment here I realised that a community can essentially sack the property if a huge corp buys it. Not much you can do if everyone around wants you gone so bad they’ll commit arson rather than let you stay.
I hope you don’t have to find out how naive that view is.
So you burn down the farm house. What about the fields? The equipment? The person who was kicked off the land already by then is still destitute. Now you’ve burned their old home down.
Now what? MAD only works when the damage can be equally devastating, and the community will already be devastated by then.
The point was more that a community can enforce that “if they don’t get it, no one will”, which I think would put a lot of companies off from buying.
It wouldn’t help the first few people get their home back, but after a couple rounds, the big corps will see that they end up losing money when the buy properties that are sacked a short time later. If there’s one thing that will make a company change its behaviour, it’s making them lose money through that behaviour.
People from many countries have fought against worse abuse of power than just corrupt cops, heck this country was founded after fighting and defeating it’s colonial ruler in civil war, why can’t people fight back again.
If you think fighting rich corporations with guns by the time they’re scooping up farms is how it should be fought, you’ve already lost.
Just because you’ve lost doesn’t mean you should give up, that’s how they keep you down, you need to have a positive outlook as well while acknowledge that there issues and keep arguing for things to get better.
all it takes is a single call from the buyer and the place will be swatted
Exactly what i was thinking