Communists, Commissars, and Consumers: The Politics of Food on the Chilean Road to Socialism

Abstract

This article examines the politics of food during Chile's Popular Unity (UP) revolution (1970-73). Organized around the rise and fall of the Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios (Price and Supply Committees, JAPs), a state-backed network of collectively managed stores and ad hoc food distribution sites, the article explores how the UP revolution expanded long-standing practices of community-led price monitoring and food distribution to make the promise of economic democracy more concrete for urban, working-class consumers. As the JAPs' power grew, however, such efforts became a political lightning rod, unifying Chile's domestic opposition around the claim that the state's presence in the food economy-rather than its absencecreated scarcity and needlessly politicized domestic life. Ultimately, the article contends that the consumer marketplace was a key arena for competing conceptualizations of democracy and the state in early 1970s Chile, anticipating the centrality of consumption to the neoliberal counterrevolution that the country experienced in the post-UP era. O n the second Wednesday of November 1972, several hundred community members gathered outside a supermarket in the población of Santa Julia, a rapidly urbanizing neighborhood on Santiago's southern periphery. They came to celebrate the achievements of Chile's Popular Unity (UP) revolution (1970-73) after two years. More urgent, however, was the task of protecting the revolution's gains from being undone. A few weeks prior, the anti-UP opposition had coordinated a nationwide closure of private businesses to coincide with a weeks-long truckers' strike. The October bosses' strike, as the event became known, crippled the distribution of consumer goods around the country. Given that it occurred as Chile's spring planting season was beginning, the protest would also decimate the country's domestic food supply well into 1973. In response, UP supporters commandeered stalled delivery trucks and pried open the chained-up entrances of privately owned For their feedback on various versions of this article as well as the larger project of which it is a part, I am grateful to

Monitor, Produce, Distribute: Chile’s Battle Against Inflation and Scarcity, 1932-1973

“…46 When the second presidency of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1952-1958) feared inflation could hit triple digits, the Chilean government implemented painful wage and public spending freezes at the behest of international financial consultants. 47 The long-term economic ineffectiveness of anti-speculatory measures, combined with the social and political costs of austerity, opened the door to new economic discussions about inflation and scarcity in Chile and Latin America. Underpinning these debates were two foundational principles of the original price control state: 1) that the state had the ability to reduce inflation and 2) that it could do so without jeopardizing basic economic development priorities.…”