A Consumers’ Revolution? Basic Needs and Citizenship on the Chilean Road to Socialism, 1970–73

Throughout Chile’s 1000-day Popular Unity (UP) revolution (1970-1973), struggles over food played a key role in shaping the political identities of UP militants and UP opponents alike. When purchasing power soared in the early days of the revolution, a surge in consumption became arguably the most concrete success of Chile’s unique experiment in democratic socialism. However, when consumer shortages and inflation reemerged in the second-half of the revolution, the actions of many consumers gave fuel to a violent counterrevolution; to this day, pictures of women banging empty pots and pans in protest or simply waiting in lines that winded on for blocks remain some of the most contentious images of the revolution.

This paper analyzes the history of food politics during the revolution through the history of the largely pro-UP network of neighborhood consumer committees known as the juntas de abastecimiento y precios (price and supply committees), or JAP. By decentralizing the distribution of basic goods to local community boards, the UP believed it could cut out middlemen from the supply chain, improve the efficiency of basic commercial exchange, and, at the same time fulfill popular demands for greater popular participation in the national economy. Building on consumer mobilizations by working people in the 1940s, the JAPs were one way that Chileans, particularly working-class women living in Chile’s urban periphery, made concrete sense of what socialist economics meant. Over time, however, the JAP also became a site for contentious disputes among neighbors about the nature of citizenship. As I argue, even more than their economic function, the JAP became a crucible in which two visions of citizenship crystallized: one based on the class-based right of the collective to basic nutrition and the other grounded in the prerogative of private producers and distributors to operate with minimal state interference.