elfwreck:

systlin:

unbossed:

positive-memes:

Wholesome farmers

This reminds me of the “penny auctions” of the Great Depression.

I’m reblogging this again, because I forgot to mention; 

My family has lived in Iowa for, oh, a hundred and twenty years? Maybe a hundred and thirty.

My grandpa and grandma and great grandpa and grandma were part of the penny auctions and bullying bankers and mortgage holders into behaving. 

Grandpa was 6′ 3″. Great grandpa was an inch shorter. Both were big old farm boys, who could heft an eighty pound hay bale in each hand and toss them up on the hay wagon. 

Grandma told me a few times about how they went around with some of their buddies to ‘explain things’ to mortgage holders during the Depression, and how the farmers would all get together for coffee and settle among everyone in the township how no one was going to bid on the Miller auction but the Millers, and oh, if everyone could chip in fifty cents or so to loan the Millers to buy their land and equipment back at the auction, that’d be the Right Thing To Do.  

This is still a point of pride for many farming families around here, decades later. 

One of the great toxins of the late 20th century is the “nuclear family” meme, in which a social unit is supposed to be 4-5 people consisting of two adults and their offspring.

The corporations have a vested interest in destroying extended families and neighborhood communities. They know damn well that if people cooperate, they don’t need to buy as much, and they don’t need to pay as much for what they do buy.

(Every farm may need a tractor, because planting and harvest happen at the same time for everyone, but if people are sharing resources, everyone doesn’t need a full maintenance kit. And every household doesn’t need a sewing machine if people get along well enough to share; a town may need a few of them, but they don’t need one per household. Everyone needs a winter coat, but children don’t need a brand new one every time they outgrow one, and so on.)

And of course, if people are united in their understanding of fair treatment, capitalists can’t schism the community by offering profits to one while leaving another destitute. 

Penny Auctions are an example of an unofficial, unrecognized farmers’ union. There’s no government support for them – just people working together to keep their families and communities safe.