Communists, Commissars, and Consumers

The Politics of Food on the Chilean Road to Socialism

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2836993
AutoresJoshua Frens-String (autor correspondente)
Ano2018
Volume98
Fascículo3
Páginas471-501
Data de publicação2018-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-6933567
OpenAlexW2883869747
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas35

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 absence-created 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

Centrality · Communism · Democracy · Economics · Economy · Food distribution · Market economy · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scarcity · Socialism · State (computer science) · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Food, Nutrition, and Cultural Practices · Law · Organic Food and Agriculture