Post AiWhKUpL2LBbzePLii by TerryHancock@realsocial.life
(DIR) More posts by TerryHancock@realsocial.life
(DIR) Post #AiWZgjpP91JhFvX9KS by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T17:45:44Z
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Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, I don't know a lot about the great depression. But I've been thinking about the great depression lately, for reasons that I assume are fairly self evident, and I'm thinking about the mechanisms that enabled it, and I'm drawing conclusions and modern parallels. I don't know if these conclusions are right, or if these modern parallels are sensible. I don't know the inner secrets of the universe. These are just some things I'm thinking about.
(DIR) Post #AiWa1aHlongrk2k2uu by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T17:49:32Z
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So we were taught in school that the great depression happened because people were buying stocks on credit, and artificially inflating stock prices, and then the market crashed and everyone suffered. But... I mean, there's no way that's the whole story, right? I'm sure the causes are significantly less straightforward than speculative stock buys, but even if they aren't more complicated than I expect ... Well, the depression lasted a long time, and a lot of the knock on effects are explained away by the stock market.
(DIR) Post #AiWahbOw3qGdMd83FY by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T17:57:08Z
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Powell has said explicitly that the goal of raising interest rates is to lower wages and decrease buying power (as a curb on inflation, allegedly, but what good are prices that go up a little slower in the face of wages that are falling?) to me, this feels like an explicit attack on workers. I can't say for certain if the length of the great depression was also the result of an attack on workers, I'm not that kind of scholar, but I can say that labor power in the US in the 10s and 20s was on the rise, and that we have once again seen unusually high rates labor action over the last 10 years.If I was an asshole who worked in government and I was afraid that low unemployment was driving up wages, leading to an increase in leisure time, and enabling a more politically active (and occasionally forceful) populace, I dunno what I'd do differently.
(DIR) Post #AiWapHGumkgNFb2Mpk by TAI@mstdn.social
2024-06-02T17:58:26Z
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@ajroach42 printing money (counterfeit in reality) to sustain lifestyles of those who produce nothing outpaced the needs of the people that actually do the work.
(DIR) Post #AiWb5gxd2g8JYZqL6e by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:01:27Z
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But lets assume taht the common story is true. If we accept that the great depression happened because of buying stock on credit. A bunch of companies folded, and that the government didn't do anything because they didn't think it was their problem, or they didn't know how, or whatever, then ... what's to stop that from happening now? We've seen a massive concentration of wealth in to the hands of an increasingly small portion of the population. We've seen stock prices artificially inflated beyond any reason on the back of stock buybacks. We've seen a crypto bubble and an NFT bubble, and we never really recovered from 08, or 00. The banks are so concentrated they might as well be their own governments. So what happens when the invisible hand realizes it's all built on lies and everything falls apart?
(DIR) Post #AiWbXWyhkcYKhjcZPc by halla@fosstodon.org
2024-06-02T18:06:29Z
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@ajroach42 Oh, we'll starve, of course.
(DIR) Post #AiWbcI7mP6605J8U0u by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:07:23Z
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Well, a big side effect of the great depression was massive unemployment. This massive unemployment was brought about as a result of the fact that firms stopped making things. Firms stopped making things because no one was buying things. No one was buying things because no one had any money. It was this kind of vicious little circle that reinforced itself, and we're taught that the new deal solved things by creating public works programs (and it's possible that this is true! I dunno!) but it seems like most of what got us out of the depression was the US entry in to the second world war. This idea of going to war for a good economy has resulted in the US being engaged in some manner of warfare or other for a majority of the time since the start of the second world war. But uhhh... going to war for the economy doesn't work when you're already at war because of the economy, you know?
(DIR) Post #AiWboKXRFrsf2usVZw by trainman@sfba.social
2024-06-02T18:09:34Z
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@ajroach42 When we realize that governments are essentially stupid anything can, and does, happen.
(DIR) Post #AiWcEDpgoD8tmIlFM8 by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:14:14Z
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But this world is different than the world 100 years ago. In many ways, it's better. In many ways, it's worse. In many ways, it's just different. We have a capacity for small scale, distributed manufacturing that didn't exist 100 years ago. We have a surplus of manufactured goods that could likely comfortably sustain our society for decades, already sitting in warehouses, thrift stores, etc. (and, frankly, crowding landfills. Being shipped around the world and burned. A large percentage of the clothes that are manufactured are destroyed before they've ever been worn!) We have fewer farms, and fewer farmers, but we also have 100 years of refinement to gardening and farming techniques. We have hydroponics and artifical sunlight and decades of advancement in greenhouses.
(DIR) Post #AiWcLRqv58JvHqmYTI by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:15:32Z
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We also have many more guns and much more ammunition, and a populace that's already at each other's throats.
(DIR) Post #AiWcybnK3G7NPnlxxI by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:22:34Z
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But, let's assume that the point of a system is what it does: The US economy hurts works for the benefit of corporations and capital holders, building a teetering tower that will eventually collapse. It has collapsed spectacularly Twice in my lifetime, and each time it was built back with lots of hope and duct tape. By these terms, the US economy is a machine designed to extract value from workers and transfer wealth to the capital class as recklessly as possible. By these terms, every bust is the system working as it was designed. The capitalist class has externalized the plight of the workers. Our blood is the fuel for their machine, and they are depending on the US government to keep people alive and buying things, to kickstart the engine when they run it dry.
(DIR) Post #AiWdRGJezFFlCOYrvk by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:27:46Z
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This is, in explicit terms class warfare. So how do we, as a society not as individuals, prepare? It's tempting to look towards the homesteader lifestyle, to buy a bunch of solar cells and batteries and a tractor and four acres of land in the middle of nowhere, and to turn subsistence farming. This is the wrong answer. This is incredibly difficult to do, and likely to be really precarious and fragile. The whole reason society exists is because it's easier for us to each do a little bit of the work of keeping us all alive and safe and clothed and fed than it is for any individual or small group to go it alone. We're less likely to starve if we're growing food across more than four acres.
(DIR) Post #AiWdYm8n3tRnvd3lgW by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:29:10Z
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When I say it's tempting to do, I mean it was absolutely my plan before I realized it was both selfish and basically impossible. This is the opt out mindest of the hippie communes and the whole earth catalog. It's a libertarian fantasy.
(DIR) Post #AiWdlizg4cHpvtyKSu by SKleefeld@mastodon.social
2024-06-02T18:31:29Z
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@ajroach42 Part the market crash stemmed from the SPEED with which everyone tried unloading their stocks. Traders all panicked simultaneously. Precisely because of that, they set up an automatic trading shutoff -- if there's too much volatility in too short a time, all trading shuts down automatically to prevent a massive panic. That's why we haven't had a second Great Depression. There was an instance just a few years ago where some computer trading got out of hand & the whole system shut down.
(DIR) Post #AiWdxPvUn8iwGsaj6O by alcinnz@floss.social
2024-06-02T18:33:32Z
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@ajroach42 I've heard homesteading advocated in my circles...Really irks me when Starlink is advocated for as an "off grid" solution...
(DIR) Post #AiWeaUQlygqvXFqu6y by dorian@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:40:37Z
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@ajroach42 my passion and dreams lately have swirled around ideas of getting a neighbors to farm together. Some of us are physically abled enough to do the labor of planting and harvesting. Some are capable of only doing so in small container herb gardens. Some of us can't do more than sit and watch the birds.aybe some can't garden but can cook. I don't want to feed myself by homesteading, rather I want to feed my community, grow herbs that can be used to treat ailments. On this route I'm incredibly inspired by the works of Robin Wall Kimmerer. She's an indigenous botanist whose tribes lived where I do now. Return to the earth and growing our own food again are key, but not in a return to subsistence farming. That's a European tradition that is very difficult to bear.
(DIR) Post #AiWedspVifQ24n2cpE by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:41:14Z
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Instead, we must work together. We must explicitly and intentionally care for one another. We must find and build communities, networks of support and mutual aide. We must let compassion drive us. Yes, we should produce food. Yes, we should manufacture the things people need to survive.Yes, we should defend ourselves, and one another. But we have to do these things now. The "economy" will continue to grow and shrink and strangle workers for the benefit of capital, and we must take every opportunity to fight against it, until such time as more direct action is available.
(DIR) Post #AiWenk84vGJhzJQa5w by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:43:04Z
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@dorian It has to be done with compassion as a community.
(DIR) Post #AiWfImuqc0XDbj2hEG by dorian@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:48:36Z
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@ajroach42 indeed! Because we all have to help each other. Homesteading fucking sucks. Let's Community-stead.
(DIR) Post #AiWfMKhJT8QdFSOzg0 by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:49:18Z
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(I don't know if this is helpful or meaningful, but these is how I strive to live my life.)
(DIR) Post #AiWfevvhmO27vz0Gga by freakazoid@retro.social
2024-06-02T18:51:59Z
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@ajroach42 It seems pretty widely accepted that the Fed raising interest rates in response to the crash was a huge exacerbating factor. But at the time I don't think they really understood what the effects would be. Neoclassical economics developed during the Depression. Whatever one thinks about it, we get the idea of reducing interest rates during economic downturns and increasing them during periods of inflation from it.
(DIR) Post #AiWg5UeHJliD8sW6gS by JustChapman@mastodon.social
2024-06-02T18:57:24Z
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@ajroach42 Community buoys any economic downturn. If you think you can survive on your own, you had better think again.
(DIR) Post #AiWhKUpL2LBbzePLii by TerryHancock@realsocial.life
2024-06-02T19:11:20Z
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@ajroach42Not a correction, but an alternative view I found interesting was that the Depression was an economic "market correction" due to the US economy flipping from an agrarian to an industrial basis.Industry existed in the 19th century, but it wasn't the dominant form of wealth production until the early 20th century.Many social values, laws, and market practices were still based on agrarian models.I'm not sure where I first saw this idea, but it made a lot of sense to me.And...
(DIR) Post #AiWhcoYcQ0nsOlK2NM by tayledras@mastodon.social
2024-06-02T19:14:41Z
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@ajroach42 Other nations have and value multigenerational households to shoulder and share the pain & cost of living.In the United States, we value individualism so much that the American Dream is a 5000 sq ft house for a couple and maybe their children.Our system broke in part because we value only ourselves and not each other. "It takes a village" is not only society but also families, but we value neither.Individualism is not sustainable.
(DIR) Post #AiWhmflVxhAG1h3Snw by TerryHancock@realsocial.life
2024-06-02T19:16:02Z
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@ajroach42And now a century later, something very similar has happened with information production toppling the supremacy of the industrial economy and its norms and practices.Industrial-based notions of scarcity and centralized capital do not make the sense they once did.And both modern Capitalism and 20th century Communism are based on these assumptions which are no longer true. So they are both obsolete, though it remains to be seen what parts of them will be integrated into what's next.
(DIR) Post #AiXRSjfrKghEIzCrCK by belcher@mastodon.xyz
2024-06-03T03:48:15Z
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@ajroach42 Cooperation Jackson posted this on twitter a while back and I think about it often.
(DIR) Post #AiaDaZjrLB7lvJnk24 by ddlyh@topspicy.social
2024-06-04T11:56:58Z
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@ajroach42Presumably a cross between homesteader and a commune is one way to go, but you'd need to create networks too...