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

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 sit...

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Published in:Hispanic American Historical Review Vol. 98; no. 3; pp. 471 - 502
Main Author: Frens-String, Joshua
Format: Article
Published: Duke University Press Aug2018
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        au: Frens-String, Joshua
        affil: Assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin
      su:
        Chilean history, 1970-1973
        Unidad Popular
        Food prices
        Food supply
        Food relief
        Government policy
      sug:
        subj:
          Chilean history, 1970-1973
          Unidad Popular
          Food prices
          Food supply
          Food relief
          Government policy
      ab: 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.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
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    language: English
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