No more crabs, no more buckets

It’s about to get ugly. Thursday and Friday saw the biggest stock market losses since 2020, this time from an entirely avoidable crisis that the President and his administration have created. The stock market is not the economy, but it is a snapshot of investor confidence, and they’re shaken. Trump’s exceedingly high and nearly arbitrary tariffs appear to have been generated by AI and were announced without even a thorough check from his team. But they’re still very real, and by hitting nearly every country on Earth they’re set to severely damage international trade and the global economy.

Even if you assume Trump’s stated intention of bringing more manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. is true, this shock therapy will do mass harm in the short term and is unlikely to succeed in the long term. Hell, it’s unlikely to even be his intention. Knowing Trump he’s more interested in extracting personal concessions from countries and corporations than in fixing the U.S. economy, bringing back manufacturing jobs, and resuscitating the middle class. Either way the total uncertainty around the globe and companies’ inability to plan for the next few months, let alone the next few years, is likely to lead to a worldwide recession, or worse.

So now what? It’s going to get worse before it gets better, but battening down the hatches and praying for the best won’t save us. We can’t do this rough patch alone, we can’t just look out for ourselves and try to play it smart and hope that things bounce back in a year or two. This time is different. Most obviously, our government has been taken over by fascist billionaires who are only interested in their own ends, their own power. They don’t care about us, or necessarily the broader economic outlook. At the helm of the wealthiest and most powerful country on Earth they can weather the storms they create and profit from every downturn, every disaster. We can’t count on them for anything.

So we need each other more than ever. Where the culture of entrepreneurship and hustle and capitalism tells us we win by being selfish, by dragging others down, by being crabs in a bucket, we instead need to band together right now. We got glimpses of this during the last massive economic crisis, starting in March 2020. The beginning of the pandemic saw millions of people mobilize to feed one another, to help keep each other housed, to help neighbors survive.

One New York mutual aid group I know had over 8,000 people plugged into a Slack channel early in the pandemic. All in one neighborhood. Thousands and thousands of dollars went from those who had stability and means to neighbors who were struggling. Lives were undoubtedly saved by this generosity and solidarity. People were able to stay in their homes, children didn’t go hungry, and remarkable organizing made it happen. Now this group has maybe 100 active members. It’s still a wonderful organization, but in our desire to return to normal a whole lot of people set aside some of the transformative tools we’d briefly picked up. We didn’t want to believe that a full return to normalcy was impossible, but now we find ourselves back where we began.

We find ourselves on the cusp of a massive economic downturn, one paired with all-out authoritarian rule. Every transformative tool in the toolkit needs to be taken up, studied, and utilized. During the Great Depression people picked up and ran with methods of survival, new and old. Necessity really is the mother of invention, and throughout the Depression people doubled down on tried and true organizing methods, but also innovated where necessary and took new risks they weren’t willing to take during more comfortable times.

A lot of the radical organizing of the Depression era took the form of legions of unemployed, suddenly struggling to eat and keep a roof over their heads, organizing into councils with the Communist Party, with the more radical unions, and with their neighbors. One famous example from NYC, recounted by Mark Naison, reads:

“In early January of 1932, the Upper Bronx Unemployed Council unveiled rent strikes at three large apartment buildings in Bronx Park East … In each of these buildings, the majority of the tenants agreed to withhold their rent and began picketing their buildings to demand 15% reductions in rent, an end to evictions, repairs in apartments, and recognition of the tenants’ committee as an official bargaining agent.. the first set of attempted evictions, at 2302 Olinville Avenue, set off a ‘rent riot’ in which over four thousand people participated. As the city marshals and the police moved into position to evict seventeen tenants, a huge crowd, composed largely of residents of the Co-ops, gathered in a vacant lot next to the building to support the strikers, who were poised to resist from windows and the roof. When the marshals moved into the building and the first stick of furniture appeared on the street, the crowd charged the police and began pummeling them with fists, stones, and sticks, while the ‘non-combatants urged the belligerents to greater fury with anathemas for capitalism, the police and landlords.’”

That is just one story of many. Sometimes marshals would show up at a rural home and be surprised to find a cadre of armed men telling them to turn around. Unemployed Councils agitated for the government to provide jobs via public works, demanded the unemployed get paid a weekly stipend, pushed for the creation of a national unemployment insurance fund, and more. While not every effort was successful, FDR signed the Social Security Act in 1935, which guaranteed pensions to millions of Americans, set up a system of unemployment insurance, and stipulated that the federal government would help care for dependent children and the disabled. The New Deal also included the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and other programs that together employed millions on the government payroll, a key demand of the organized masses. None of this would’ve happened without widespread, radical organizing from the left and the unemployed in the toughest of times.

All of this is just the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to organizing during the Depression. People were desperate, and plenty surely tried to make it on their own, weakly fighting a system-wide meltdown as hapless individuals. But millions also got together, knowing that together they could maybe make a dent, together they could survive a little better. Ultimately the hope was, and is, that together we can do more than just survive. Ultimately, the hope is that in our struggle to survive we build transformation, build a real way out, emerge from this period not just scrabbling to exist but having found ways to collectively thrive.

Photo by Sonder Quest on Unsplash

One of the many lessons we need to internalize as hard times come our way is that we have to fight together even when it feels like we could maybe make it alone. You might have the resources to make it through by yourself, you might really have everything you need riding solo, but in order to have something more, in order to have thriving community and transform society so that we’re not stuck in cycles of fascism and economic collapse, we need each other. That truth is undeniable, even if we’ve spent our lives being told in ten different ways that we don’t need our neighbors. We’ll learn this lesson one way or another, and it’s a whole lot better to learn it today than a decade down the line.

Fortunately, people have been laying the foundation for this moment, some for years, some for decades. That New York mutual aid group I mentioned earlier never went dormant. They’ve been helping feed, clothe, and support their neighbors for five years, and recently they’ve been deliberately growing more political and merging their work with other local organizing, block associations, and neighborhood groups. Caring for each other, especially at scale, takes work, preparation, and intentionality.

We’re ruled by people who will never understand these lessons. We’re ruled by people for whom the future does not exist. They want to extract everything they can right here and now, and leave us behind to live in a hollowed-out husk. They won’t see us through this crisis — they created it and they’ll be busy trying to find ways to profit from it. As Naomi Klein writes, the ruling class has built “a system that invites destruction and disaster then swoops in with private helicopters and airlifts them and their friends to divine safety.”

So it’s on us. It’s on us to not be crabs in a bucket when the going gets tough, and instead come together and aim for long-term, radical solutions that don’t just see us through this crisis but see through to the underlying causes of our problems. We’ve been on this path for some time, a path that either forks off into radical change or leads on to destruction. In the trenches, in the economic downturn that is now all but certain to hit us, this is when we have to choose to transform.

Photo by kim on Unsplash

These moments that seem darkest are when more and more people are willing to set aside old ideas, willing to acknowledge that business as usual is no longer working, and willing to jump into the work of shifting society. It often starts with the simple desire to not get evicted, to put food on the table, to survive, but day by day more people will want a real way out, real answers, solutions that go beyond the daily struggle to make ends meet and provide real, long-term hope. It’s on us to shine that light at the end of the tunnel and bring people towards a future where we provide for our needs, where the abundance of this world is shared, and where just existing on this planet isn’t a stressful experience because we’ve reordered society away from the hoarding few and towards a decent life for everyone.

Just the other day I was in Wheeling, West Virginia. The friend who picked us up from the airport is a social maven, an organizer, a guy who brings people together. And he’s used those abilities alongside a couple hundred other wonderful people in town to build community. As we arrived at his house more than a dozen people were out back making pizza, chatting, and just having a good time. That night we met some wonderful new friends, and learned that these West Virginians came together because they want community, but also because they want political transformation. Everyone around us was working towards worker and tenant co-ops, fresh produce on a communally owned farm, the revitalization of their town, and broader societal change.

The people we met that night, and got to know over the next few days, are working on a way out and through. They want to build a better city, a sustainable and good life for themselves and their neighbors. Through their organizing and community building these folks are building preparedness for the world we’re entering into. They’re building networks of mutual support and a path that other community members will be able to use, people who don’t even know they’ll need it yet. They’re lighting a way through the darkness and toward the future we need.

There are people like this in every town, every region. When I got back to New York I was able to hop back into the group I organize with, which is opening a community space soon, bringing block associations together, developing new systems for child care in our neighborhood and more. There are people everywhere who long ago dropped the idea that any one of us can do this alone, and embraced the reality that we need each other to get through this mess and to create a better world. Join up, find each other, get friends together and get ready to weather this storm we’re about to face. It’s here, and those who have a vision and a plan for overcoming individualism and building something better together are the people who can help you see this through.