Vincent Keymer continuing his journey to the top of the chess world

He may be just 17, but Vincent Keymer is already Germany's best chess player and finished second at the 2021 European Chess Championship. Bigger and better things promise to be in store for the young star in 2022

Vincent Keymer is looking forward to a better 2022

One year ago, Vincent Keymer was determined to concentrate on preparations for his high-school leaving examination. But that simply didn't happen.

"I've played a lot of tournaments since June. That's why I haven't been to school that often and have missed a lot," the 17-year-old told DW.

A few weeks ago, the teenager earned a place in the Grand Prix series of the World Chess Federation, a qualifying tournament for the next World Chess Championship, which is slated to start as soon as February. Fortunately, for him, he'll be done with his written exams by the end of January.

"I will prepare as well as I can for the tournaments despite school," he said.

Almost always the youngest

Keymer is the first German in almost half a century who has a shot at winning a world championship one day, although this is unlikely to happen in 2022. He'll be up against 23 world-class players in the Grand Prix series, which is to be held in Berlin and Belgrade. Only two of them will qualify for the Candidates Tournament, which will determine the next challenger to serial world champion Magnus Carlsen.

Keymer is by far the youngest in the Grand Prix.

"I'm not at the top of the world yet," he said "After all, you have to know that only a few players ever even make it to a Candidate Tournament for the World Championship."

Keymer (playing at right) is usually the youngest in the room

Controlled offensive game

Already, Keymer impresses with his well-balanced offensive chess even against some of the best players. And when things get tight towards the end, he tends to keep his cool. Things went particularly well for Keymer at the elite Grand Swiss tournament in Riga in November. So well, in fact, not only did he finish in a sensational fifth place and win a bonus of around $15,000 (€13,2900), but he was also able to continue in the World Championship qualification. Germany's best player is currently ranked 74th in the world rankings, not quite the very top level.

"Internationally there are a lot of strong players in this age group," said Germany-based Uzbek chess coach Rustam Kasimdzhanov. "It's not yet clear who will make it into the top 10."

Keymer is certainly among those who have a legitimate shot at making it to the very top. He defeated his first grandmaster at the age of 10. At 14, he earned that title himself — something no German before him had achieved at that age. And when he faced multiple world champion Magnus Carlsen for the first time in the spring of 2019, it took the world champion more than six hours to prevail.

COVID used for training

But everything changed in March 2020, when chess, like much of the rest of the world, went into lockdown due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. For Keymer, who hails from the small wine-growing town of Saulheim near the western German city of Mainz, fast online chess and a lot of training became the order of the day. He found it a less-than-satisfying replacement for the real thing.

"I think that the game with a long time to think is what chess is all about," he said. "So I was pleased when the live tournaments resumed."

It quickly became apparent in 2021 that he had made good use of his COVID-enforced break. By the time he finished second at the European Championship in Reykjavik, it had become clear to everybody in the chess world that Keymer's game had taken a major step forward. The player himself, though, can't quite put his finger on what triggered the sudden progress.

"It definitely did me good to play a lot of tournaments in a row," said Keymer, who is coached by Peter Leko, a former World Championship finalist from Hungary. "I got pretty deep into the material and was able to study it intensively."

The COVID-19 pandemic has not slowed Keymer down

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Once he gets his high-school leaving exams out of the way, the 17-year-old is planning to dedicate himself completely to chess.

"As long as you're going to school, you can't consider it a professional sport," he said. "This will change after high school."

Whether he can make it financially in the chess world remains to be seen. Only the very best players can live off the prize money they earn.

"We are still looking for another sponsor," said Keymer, who has so far been supported by a listed leasing company and the German Chess Federation. "It's important to earn money at some point, that's for sure, but right now my focus is still on improving at the chessboard."

This article was adapted from German

Opinion: Restitution of colonial looted art is only the start

Western museums are now returning looted art to Africa. But this doesn't mean colonialist thinking is history, says Annabelle Steffes-Halmer.


This Benin bronze was recently returned to Nigeria from the University of Aberdeen

Thirty-four years — that's how long Germany's colonial rule in Africa lasted.

If you take France, which for example had colonies in Africa until the early 1960s, this period may seem comparatively short. But these 34 years were enough to traumatize people in the occupied territories, to commit the first genocide of the 20th century, namely the massacre of the Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia, and together with other colonial powers, to rob an entire continent of its cultural heritage.

Experts estimate that between 80% and 90% of Africa's cultural heritage is stored in European museums or their repositories.

But there is more at stake here than "just" art and everyday objects. When Europeans plundered Africa's treasures to fill their new ethnological museums in a veritable competition, they devastated entire towns and villages and erased the collective memory of entire nations.
Turning point after long-delayed debate

The fact that Europeans are now beginning to return objects from — as it is euphemistically called — "colonial contexts of injustice" is long overdue, especially since the discussion is not new. Prompted by the restitution demands of African intellectuals, Europe's politicians and museum experts were already discussing how to deal with this delicate "heritage" 40 years ago. But African representatives were not invited to these negotiations.

DW Culture Editor Annabelle Steffes-Halmer

The basic tenor at the time was that the pieces were better off in Europe, protected from environmental effects and decay. It was believed that Africa was incapable of protecting those pieces. It was an openly racist discourse that led to no result.

In this respect, Benedicte Savoy, one of the leading art historians in the field of looted art, rightly speaks of a turning point. In an interview with DW last year, she even likened the change in the restitution debate to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In November, France made a start by returning 26 works of art from the former Kingdom of Dahomey to present-day Benin in a ceremonial act of state. Germany will follow suit this year and begin returning the more than 1,000 Benin bronzes that are stored in various museums in the country. Among other things, they should be prominently displayed in the newly opened Humboldt Forum. Most of the valuable bronzes originate from a looting operation by British troops in 1897.

Colonial structures persist

The restitution of looted art is a start, but it must not and cannot stop there. For example, when are we going to start "giving back" Africa's raw materials? Be it coltan, bauxite or diamonds, transnational corporations continue to profit from Africa's mineral resources. However, little of this wealth reaches local populations. This unequal balance of power is also a remnant of colonial rule.

Or consider the reservations regarding the production of COVID-19 vaccines. The fact that South Africa is now embarking on producing mRNA vaccines invalidates arguments often made earlier that there is a lack of expertise and suitable production facilities outside of Europe and North America. This, too, is a racist discourse. At its core, it resembles the view museum professionals had 40 years ago about the lack of protection and care for artifacts in Africa.

Germany's colonial rule in Africa lasted 34 years. More than a century later, we are only at the beginning of a long process with the restitution of looted art and cultural objects. Perhaps this will eventually lead to "cooperation on an equal footing," as is often called for by Western politicians regarding Africa.

This article was originally in German


WHAT'S IN STORE FOR CULTURE IN 2022
January
In 2022, Kaunas in Lithuania, Esch in Luxembourg and Novi Sad in Serbia share the title of European Capitals of Culture and will launch their programs in January. As Germany starts returning the Benin Bronzes looted in colonial times this year, the new culture commissioner, Claudia Roth, will conduct a round table discussion on the topic. The Grammy Awards are scheduled for January 31.
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Africa's stolen treasures: Time to give them back?

Moscow uses “foreign agent” status to harass and persecute its opponents

By

 The Switzerland Times

 -

January 2, 2O22

 

Russia’s recent designation of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a prominent member of the feminist protest group Pussy Riot, as a “foreign agent” highlights the broad scope of the ambiguously defined label – and its effectiveness as a tool against criticism of President Vladimir Putin.

“The government can tag their asses if they want to!” This is the reaction of Tolokonnikova, a founding member of the protest rock group Pussy Riot, to the decision of President Vladimir Putin’s government on December 30 to label her as a “foreign agent.”

Besides Tolokonnikova, four other people – including famous Russian satirical writer Victor Shenderovich and art collector and columnist Marat Gelman – were also added to the list by the Russian Justice Ministry.

None of the other new “foreign agents” responded with the same sense of provocation as Tolokonnikova, a 32-year-old activist who had already been sentenced to prison in 2012 for her participation in an anti-Putin show at the Duomo. Christ in Moscow. Saviour.

On social networks, she posted a photo of herself showing the middle finger and promising not to comply with the official duties of “foreign agents”.

The Pussy Riot have said they will appeal to the courts and disregard the labeling rules for social media posts.

“Stigmatizing label”

Anyone who qualifies as a “foreign agent” must register and provide details of all their activities and finances every six months. Their posts, including all social media posts, must begin with a long, official message confirming their “foreign agent” status.

Tolokonnikova’s sharp response may give the impression that this status can be dismissed lightly, but it is far from the case. “It is a very stigmatizing label. In Russia, it is equated with the status of” enemy of the people “under Stalin,” explains Elena Volochine, TSWT correspondent in Russia.

Andrei Zakharov, a Russian journalist, went into self-exile on December 27, saying in a video that he could no longer bear the pressure of “unprecedented surveillance” he had been subjected to since he had been designated “foreign agent” last October.

This status can have very concrete consequences for people on the Russian Ministry of Justice’s list. In December, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the disbandment of Memorial, one of Russia’s most active and long-standing human rights groups. Memorial was initially added to the blacklist in 2016 for receiving international funding. The court based its decision on what they called “repeated violations” of the obligations of “foreign agents”. In his argument, the prosecutor accused the group of creating a false image of the country as a “terrorist” state.

Harass and muzzle opponents

The term “foreign agent” carries a Soviet-era tint in Russia, suggesting Cold War espionage. The law was passed in 2012 to flag overseas-funded nonprofits, but was expanded in 2017 to include independent media and individuals. This update to the law came in retaliation to state-backed broadcaster Russia Today who was asked to register as a foreign agent in the United States.

Two years later, Moscow broadened its definition of etiquette when it ruled that individual journalists – not just organizations – could also be considered “foreign agents”. Since December 2020, activists with ties to overseas funding sources have also been trapped.

Moscow initially justified the adoption of the law as a mere Russian version of a similar settlement in the United States. “This law does not prevent anything. It is not binding and only serves to improve the transparency of public life in Russia,” Putin said at the time.

For some time the Russian government was careful not to be too harsh in this area. But “from 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, Moscow really started to use this law a lot more often,” Voloshin said. Putin’s opponents quickly realized that the status of “foreign agent” would be used as a tool to harass and muzzle them.

The Kremlin has been careful not to define precisely what constitutes a “financial link with a foreign country”. “The vagueness and breadth of the wording of the law and regulatory standards lead to many ambiguities that the Ministry of Justice does not clarify,” notes OVD-Info, a Russian media also referred to as a “foreign agent”, in a report. November 2021 report.

Simple acts like participating in a press trip organized by a foreign entity, receiving gifts from friends living abroad or winning a prize in an international competition expose individuals to the label, OVD-Info noted.

Since September 2021, a financial link with a foreign country does not even seem necessary. The FSB, Russia’s domestic intelligence service, released a document that includes some 60 military-related topics that can give a journalist the status of a foreign agent if he or she works on any of the topics listed. These include corruption in the military, the development of new weapons or problems with morale among the troops.

In this context, it is not surprising that the list of “foreign agents” has grown from less than 20 organizations and individuals in 2019 to more than 110 by the end of 2021. For some, the number of designated “foreign agents” is a measure of the intensity of the witch-hunt against opponents of Putin. “The more repression there is, the more names are added to the list,” Voloshin summed up.

Having your name on the list “is very restrictive from a logistical and operational point of view,” Volochine explained. Individuals must report quarterly to detail their activities, revealing how much money they received from abroad and how it was spent.

“I no longer have any privacy because the Department of Justice knows absolutely everything about me, down to the brand of stamps I use. I have to fill out 84 pages of forms every three months to justify all my expenses.” , said journalist Lyudmila. Savitskaya, who found herself on the list of “foreign agents” at the end of 2020.

Entering “a minefield”

Another requirement for these people is that they must specify in all their publications – books, newspapers, business cards, social media posts – that they are “foreign agents”. Failure to do so can result in a fine, jail time, or closure, in the case of NGOs such as Memorial or the media.

“One of the discriminatory consequences of the law is, for example, the inability of ‘foreign agents’ to use Twitter,” writes OVD-Info. The maximum length of a Tweet is 380 characters, but the length of the official “foreign agent” tag is 220 characters. This leaves only 60 characters for the message.

“This law is a weapon that is all the more effective in that it can be used retroactively,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on security issues in Russia, in an interview with TSWT. From the point of view of the government, the interest main of this law, it is “that it weakens the interested parties”, he noted.

“Once you are on the list you become vulnerable to other types of attacks, including legal ones, because there are so many new obligations that you have to follow,” he said.

In other words, when you are designated a “foreign agent,” you step into “a minefield,” said Dmitry Treshchanin, editor of the list’s news site Mediazona, during a roundtable on the scope. of this status broadcast on YouTube in November 2021.

According to Treshchanin, the key to his power is his ambiguity. “We don’t understand the law and the justice minister doesn’t understand how to apply it,” Treshchanin said. “In fact, no one, even its creators, has a clue of how it should work. And that’s actually at the heart of the law itself, it’s been written in such a way that it can be interpreted any way.

This article was translated from the original in French.

ATTEMPTED COUP  NO D'ETAT YET

A year after Capitol riot, Americans fear for their democracy: polls

Supporters of Donald Trump gathered outside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, before violently storming the building (AFP/Jon Cherry)

Sun, January 2, 2022

One year after the violent assault on the US Capitol, Americans remain deeply concerned about the health of their democracy and about a third say violence against the government can sometimes be justified, according to two polls published Sunday.

The January 6 attack on the seat of Congress, led by supporters of Donald Trump, was "a harbinger of increasing political violence," and American democracy "is threatened," according to two-thirds of those surveyed for a CBS News poll.

Meantime, Americans' "pride" in their democracy has dropped sharply, from 90 percent in 2002 to 54 percent now, a Washington Post/University of Maryland survey found.

With the January 6 anniversary nearing, the polls offer specific causes for concern: CBS found that 28 percent of respondents believe force can be used to defend the result of an election, while 34 percent told The Washington Post that a violent action against government can sometimes be justified -- the largest percentage in decades.

The results underscore the seemingly almost irreconcilable views dividing American society, which President Joe Biden -- who took office 14 days after the Capitol rioting -- has promised to overcome.

Two-thirds of Trump supporters continue to believe his baseless charge that Biden is not the legitimately elected president.

Trump had addressed thousands of supporters shortly before the Capitol assault, telling them the election had been "rigged" and that they should "fight like hell."

Some 60 percent of those polled say Trump bears heavy responsibility for the invasion of the Capitol just as lawmakers were set to certify Biden's victory.

- 'Coordinated effort' -

There again, opinion follows partisan lines: 83 percent of Trump voters placed his level of responsibility at only "some" or "none," the Post survey found.

And 26 percent of Americans want him to run again in 2024, according to CBS.

A select committee of the House of Representatives has spent months working to establish the roles and responsibility of those who incited or may have organized the protest.

Despite limited cooperation from Trump's inner circle, the panel has conducted more than 300 interviews and collected thousands of documents.

"We have uncovered some things that cause us real concern, things like people trying to ... undermine the integrity of our democracy," the panel's chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, said Sunday on ABC.

"It appeared to be a coordinated effort on the part of a number of people to undermine the election," he said.

"It could be people in the executive branch. It could be people in the Department of Defense... and some very wealthy individuals."

He said he would not hesitate to refer any evidence of illegality to the Justice Department.

Liz Cheney, one of only two Republicans on the panel, on Sunday strongly condemned Trump for waiting hours before urging the Capitol rioters to stand down.

He could easily have issued such a call, she told ABC.

"He failed to do so. It's hard to imagine a more significant and more serious dereliction of duty."

chp/led/bbk/dw

Aquamation: The green alternative to cremation chosen by Desmond Tutu

By Ghazi Balkiz and Jennifer Hauser, 

CNN 4 hrs ago

Family members gathered to say their goodbyes to anti-apartheid hero Desmond Tutu at a private service at St. George's Cathedral on Sunday, where his ashes were interred in Cape Town and laid to rest.

 Archbishop Thabo Makgoba lays the ashes of Desmond Tutu to rest at the high altar of St George's Cathedral, with members of the Tutu family and Dean Michael Weeder of the Cathedral in the background.

At his request, the Nobel Peace Prize winner's body underwent aquamation -- considered to be a greener alternative to cremation -- South Africa's Anglican Church confirmed to CNN on Saturday.

Aquamation is a water-based process whose scientific name is "alkaline hydrolysis", in which a "combination of gentle water flow, temperature, and alkalinity are used to accelerate the breakdown of organic materials" when a body is laid to rest in soil, according to Bio-Response Solutions, a US company which specializes in the process.

The company's website says the process "uses 90% less energy than flame cremation and does not emit any harmful greenhouse gases."

According to the Cremation Association of North America (CANA), an international non-profit organization, alkaline hydrolysis is sometimes referred to as flameless cremation.

The body is placed in an alkaline hydrolysis machine, comprised of an airtight chamber filled with a solution made of water and alkaline chemicals. The chamber is then heated, liquifying the body and leaving only bone behind, according to CANA's website.

Once the bones are dried they can be pulverized. "The process results in approximately 32% more cremated remains than flame-based cremation and may require a larger urn," according to CANA.

Tutu was passionate about protecting the environment -- he gave many speeches and wrote many articles about the need to act to tackle the climate crisis. In 2007, he wrote a piece titled "This Fatal Complacency" for the Guardian in which he addressed the worrying impact that climate change was having in the Global South and on poor communities, as much of North America and Europe was yet to face extreme weather conditions caused by the climate emergency at this time.

As well as requesting an eco-friendly alternative to cremation for his body, Tutu also took other steps to ensure his funeral would be as modest as his lifestyle was -- his body laid in state in a simple pine coffin, which was the "cheapest available" at his request, his foundations said.

© Nic Bothma/Pool/AP 

Tutu's coffin is carried out of St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town at the end of his funeral service on Saturday.

Even Neo Can’t Log Off

The Matrix Resurrections makes a convincing case that the Matrix franchise is keeping us plugged into the Matrix. Unfortunately, it exhausts the viewer in doing so.

What many people were looking for in a new Matrix film was a little nostalgia to ease our very real collective anxiety. But watching the proverbial snake eat its own tail for almost two-and-a-half hours, it’s easy to lose your appetite. (Warner Bros.)

BYRYAN ZICKGRAF

JACOBIN
12.30.2021

In the early aughts, Jean Baudrillard was asked to pontificate about The Matrix.

The French philosopher’s work was among the countless influences and references that the Wachowskis had stuffed into the code of The Matrix — along with Christianity, Buddhism, Alice in Wonderland, and various science fiction and martial arts movies. Early in the first film, Keanu Reeves’s Neo hides illicit software in a hollowed-out copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus echoes one of its most notable lines when he introduces the postapocalyptic world outside of the computer simulation as “the desert of the real.”

Baudrillard, himself a kind of Cheshire Cat of media theory, refused to follow audiences down the rabbit hole. He believed The Matrix promoted a false dichotomy between the artificial world of computers and the real world of flesh and blood that had long since collapsed into a state he dubbed hyperreality.

Worse, the films reified modern systems of control by pantomiming resistance to it. “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce,” Baudrillard concluded in 2004.

But a funny thing happened. A third sequel was born — one that makes it clear that the creators of The Matrix have finally conceded Baudrillard’s point.

A Cinematic Red Pill?

The original Matrix trilogy is still arresting to rewatch these days, but not necessarily for its prophetic insights. The special-effect-driven kung fu action, cinematography, and stylish leather outfits are still fun, but the dialogue that once sounded profound to my younger self now feels leaden and the story fairly juvenile. In retrospect, these were glorified superhero movies cosplaying as thought-provoking cyberpunk.

Context is important. Part of the reason that The Matrix struck so many moviegoers like a lightning bolt is because the first one was released in 1999. It tapped into a growing apprehension over the internet — that was just then on the precipice of transforming our day-to-day existence — and articulated a growing malaise many felt about life at the End of History.

By 1999, markets and liberal democracy had finally crushed their opposition, leaving a bitter aftertaste as American institutions and social order continued to crumble. Could anyone imagine an alternative to the hypercommodified soul-crushing status quo other than to bury our heads into screens?


Instead, the Wachowskis did Gen X’s dreaming for us. The Matrix centers around a hacker named Thomas Anderson, aka Neo, who discovers that his reality is actually a computer simulation. Morpheus’s red pill sends Neo headlong into “meatspace” — as it sometimes gets called now — and propels him to embark on a hero’s journey in which he must embrace his destiny as “the One.” By the end of 2003’s The Matrix Revolutions, the final installment in the original trilogy, this trench coat–wearing Messiah leads humanity’s resistance to the machines one AI-killing punch at a time, paving the way for a new and free society.

In addition to the first two sequels, there was an animated series, several video games, and a cultlike following on the internet devoted to deciphering the franchise’s mythologies and meanings. The concept of being “red-pilled” is perhaps its longest-lasting legacy — a metaphor for emerging out of a narcotic-induced slumber and discovering the concealed Truth of a powerful system, whether it’s capitalist realism, the gender binary, the origins of COVID-19, or the “true winner” of the 2020 presidential election.

To their credit, the writers of The Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, and Aleksandar Hemon) are fully aware of the franchise’s lasting legacy, and, well, they’re somewhat embarrassed by it.

For much of its first act, Resurrections doubles as an extended apology tour for itself. Much like Star Wars’ divisive sequel The Last Jedi, it’s a self-aware pop culture product that defies fans’ expectations and deconstructs its own mythologies while flaunting the breaking of the rules that were supposed to dictate it. Hey, machines aren’t all evil anymore, some of them are actually helpful and cute! Neo is an aging middle-aged dude who can’t fly and isn’t even the One. And is staying plugged into the Matrix really the worst thing in the world?The problem with making a new meta-Matrix movie about how The Matrix is the new Matrix is that it makes for exhausting, often tedious entertainment.

The film opens with Neo’s alter ego Thomas Anderson back inside the confines of the Matrix, but this time stuck in a listless existence as a famous video game designer, one who created a highly successful game called — yes — The Matrix. While Anderson expresses ambivalence about the game’s omnipresence in the culture (it “entertained some kids,” he remarks to Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity/Tiffany character with a shrug), everyone else seems to be living in The Matrix’s long shadow. One hilarious early scene features young video game developers who hotly debate the Matrix while sipping coffee from a nearby shop called “Simulatte.” Is it an allegory about trans rights? Capitalist exploitation?

To the Man Who Would be Neo Again, it seems counterintuitive for the Matrix (the enslaving computer program) to put The Matrix (the cultural product), at the center of a virtual prison meant to trick human beings into believing it doesn’t exist. But this upgraded 2.0 version of the Matrix keeps humans stuck in suspended sacs of slime better than ever, says its creator, an AI called the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris). The secret sauce? The robots observe people’s real “fears and desires” and then sell them back to us.

In one poignant scene, the character Bugs admits as much to Neo:

They took your story, something that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something trivial. That’s what the Matrix does. It weaponizes every idea. . . . Where better to bury truth than inside something as ordinary as a video game?

This quote is one of the movie’s many acts of self-immolation, but it reflects Baudrillard’s view that our rage against the machine actually strengthens the machine’s grip on us when it’s packaged in the form of Rage Against the Machine (™), a capitalistic product in a universe where that’s the only thing that matters, a pacifying media spectacle among spectacles. Why organize a messy revolution when you can just consume one on your phone instead?

Even the character of Neo somehow fits into the Baudrillard extended universe. “Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation,” Baudrillard once wrote. As such, Neo represents both the old and the new fused into one — a fictional Jesus figure for the faux-resistance against mindless consumption, with the Oracle character serving as his Holy Spirit.

Thus, the twisty meta-narrative of Resurrections ultimately asks us to confront a provocative and uncomfortable question: What if The Matrix movies and the media ecosystem that created it is the closest thing we have to the Matrix . . . and we’re already trapped inside it?

“You’re getting warmer,” Baudrillard might say. For the French thinker, the pacification of everyday life happened way before Mark Zuckerberg ever uttered the term “metaverse.” It’s through the processes of becoming an information-based and consumer society — the mass adoption of mass media. Movies like The Matrix, he said, “are to culture what life insurance is to life: it is there to ward off its dangers.”

Maybe so, but the problem with making a new meta-Matrix movie about how The Matrix is the new Matrix is that it makes for exhausting, often tedious entertainment. In the spirit of being meta, I probably had more fun thinking about Resurrections and writing this essay than actually watching it.

The truth is, plugging ourselves into the illusory comforts of HBO Max, Zuckerberg’s virtual reality playground, or something like the original Matrix looks ever more tempting these days. Over the last two years, millions are dead from a pandemic, many more are sick, depressed, or ridden with anxiety. Too many of us are fighting over masks, vaccines, and politics, uploading every uncomfortable moment with another person on social media in the hopes of digital mob justice all while a homicide wave continues to wreak havoc across the country, breaking records in cities like Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Austin.

The tension is palpable: the social fabric has frayed further due to isolation, alienation, and a lack of material security, and we’re starting to treat people in real life like we do on social media — terribly.

What many people were looking for in a new Matrix film was a little nostalgia to ease our very real collective anxiety, as the new computer version of Morpheus smartly posits in Resurrections. But watching the proverbial snake eat its own tail for almost two-and-a-half hours, it’s easy to lose your appetite.

And as a pop culture corrective, Resurrections’s message is likely to fall on deaf ears. Much of the political energy these days, on both the Left and the Right, is obsessively focused on the power to control flows of information and making sure that everyone has a healthy media diet free of disinformation. The Right, for instance, wants to outmuscle Big Tech’s liberal bias and dispel all mentions of race and gender in education, while the Left’s street protests for racial justice got subsumed into woke book clubs and Netflix’s “Uplifting Black Voices” playlists.

At the same time that Neo and Trinity boldly returned to the cinema, so too did Spider-Man: No Way Home and Don’t Look Up. The former blockbuster flick was seen by many social media commentators and critic types as yet another mindless superhero sequel-cum-reboot cash grab by Disney/Marvel, one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. The latter? A refreshing, even important, satire about our collective inaction on climate change.

Yet both exist in the cold, electronic light of the mass media whose ultimate function is “to neutralize the lived, unique, eventual character of the world and substitute for it a multiple universe of media which, as such, are homogeneous one with another, signifying each other reciprocally and referring back and forth to each other,” which Baudrillard wrote in The Consumer Society, some thirty years before the debut of The Matrix. Sound familiar? In the end, Spider-Man isn’t a blue pill, and Don’t Look Up and Matrix Resurrections aren’t cinematic versions of red pills. All of them offer nothing more than a placebo effect.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Zickgraf is an Alabama-based journalist and is the editor of Third Rail Mag.

Chile’s Socialist Resurgence Is a Century in the Making

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSHUA FRENS-STRING

01.01.2022

Gabriel Boric’s presidential victory and a new constitution are the crowning achievements of Chile’s broad socialist movement. Now comes the hard part: fulfilling a vision of working-class prosperity that stretches back to Salvador Allende and beyond.

The Monument to Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile. 

(David Berkowitz / Flickr)

LONG READ

It took the Chilean left over fifty years to return to power, and the victory is worth savoring. Still, Gabriel Boric, the new president-elect of Chile, will take office on March 11, 2022, with a daunting mandate: to begin the arduous work of dismantling a deeply entrenched neoliberal system and fulfill the lofty expectations for a more robust, constitutionally enshrined welfare state.

Boric may take some solace in knowing that his victory is the latest in a centuries-long struggle to make Chilean society a place of working-class well-being and prosperity. That was the dream of Salvador Allende when, in 1939, the still fresh-faced socialist physician assumed the role of health minister for the left-wing governing alliance of Pedro Aguirre Cerda’s Popular Front administration.

Allende would go on in 1970 to become the famed leader of the “Chilean path to socialism”: an unprecedented thousand-day-long experiment in popular governance that included nationalizations of key industries, the creation of working-class institutions of representation, and, perhaps most controversially, a program for radical, accelerated agrarian reform.

By some accounts, it was actually the agrarian reform program that triggered the 1973 coup against Allende’s Popular Unity government: his push to redistribute land, place food distribution under worker control, and create worker-regulated food markets was a bridge too far for Chile’s landed elite, midsize business owners, middle-class consumers, and their military and political allies.

In his new book Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile, historian Joshua Frens-String shows that underlying the drive for agrarian reform and consumer protections was a vision of working-class abundance — what Allende called the “Revolution of Wine and Empanadas” — that had deep roots in Chile’s century-old socialist movement. In fact, in Frens-String’s account, the Chilean path to socialism was as much about creating a vibrant consumer society as it was democracy, albeit a socialist consumer society.

Frens-String traces the history of Allende’s 1970 government all the way back to the 1910s and ’20s, when working-class nutrition became the banner of a fledgling Chilean socialist movement; he follows that story through to the 1930s, when the left-wing Popular Front government put “food politics” at the heart of its campaign to define the good life as one of both prosperity and nutritional equality. And he shows how debates around food production shaped the thinking of Chile’s economic planners trying simultaneously to overcome underdevelopment while guaranteeing adequate caloric intake for the Chilean masses in the 1950s and ’60s.

Hungry for Revolution is a unique and necessary history of the Chilean left, and has a great deal to say about the future of Chilean socialist and progressive politics. Today, amid calls to include a clause in Chile’s new constitution that would protect the right to healthy and sustainable nutrition and against the backdrop of a growing food crisis in which working-class Chileans are taking on unprecedented household debt just to fill their pantries, Hungry for Revolution is as much a book about the past as it is the future.

Jacobin contributing editor Nicolas Allen spoke to Frens-String to learn more about how the working-class dream of “wine and empanadas” became the basis for a political revolution, and how that dream can be revived amid a left-wing resurgence in Chile today.
NA

Speak about the initial inspiration for your book. On the surface, it seems to be about a fairly niche topic, “food politics” and history of popular consumption in Chile. But as you read on, you realize that it’s actually a retelling of the history of the 20th-century Chilean left that touches on almost every issue imaginable: agrarian reform, development, state planning, markets, worker control, democracy, popular power — really, the issues that the Chilean left spent decades debating and arguing over.
JF-S

Yes, my goals in writing the book were, first, to show how food politics and the food system offer a window into the history of these various issues. But second, I wanted to show that the struggle over how food was produced, how it was distributed, and how it was consumed during the twentieth century actually drove political and economic change in Chile. In many ways, the battle over the food system came to define the meaning of and set the parameters for a more inclusive state and a more capacious, social understanding of citizenship.

Apart from that, one thing that fascinated me personally and really inspired my research is the fact that a democratically elected socialist government — Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition (1970–73) — was followed immediately afterward by the global premiere of neoliberalism in 1973. In Hungry for Revolution, I try to think about how those two diametrically opposed systems of economic organization could coexist in the same country within a roughly ten-year period of one another.

Scholars and activists have highlighted that a defining feature of the Chilean neoliberal experience has been how it became a uniquely consumer-driven society, where consumer freedom is often held up by promoters of neoliberal policies as the metric by which citizenship should be measured. In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and after, notions of robust social and economic citizenship were replaced by an idea of a society of consumers who express their preferences and act in the marketplace rather than, say, through mass political organizations.

As I began to try to understand how those two apparently incongruous political tendencies could follow one another in rapid succession, I went back in time and realized that there was no necessary or logical association between the political right and a “consumer society.” In fact, the Right didn’t even talk much about consumption during the early or mid-twentieth century. If anything, the language of consumption and a consumer society was something associated with progressive movements going back to the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s, all the way up to the revolutionary years of the 1970s. It was the Left that was arguing all that time that citizens deserved a basic right to consumption.There was no association between the Right and a ‘consumer society.’ If anything, the language of a consumer society was associated with progressive movements.

Granted, it was a different type of consumption than the neoliberal version, and I make a careful distinction in the book between a consumption politics that emphasized consumption as a right of citizenship and neoliberal consumerism, which suggested that consumption was a market-based privilege rather than a guaranteed right. The former was a hallmark of the labor movement and of the Communist Party, as well as middle-class reform movements throughout the twentieth century: making sure that Chilean citizens had a basic right to consume a whole host of goods that were considered subsistence goods or staples. As the movement grew, the list of what were considered “staples” also grew.

By the mid-twentieth century, this left-wing emphasis on consumption led a host of actors — economists, scientists, and state officials — to think critically about how to produce consumer goods, how those goods should be distributed throughout the economy, and how the whole orientation of economic development could be geared toward realizing an “abundant” modern society.

Another thing that interested me about Chile is the origins of the Popular Unity revolution in the early 1970s. There’s a traditional narrative, especially in the United States, that places that revolution within the global Cold War context as a satellite struggle for the larger global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. If you take the history of the Popular Unity revolution back three or four decades, you find a more interesting domestic story about the origins of the Popular Unity government that reaches back to political organizing in the 1930s through the Chilean Popular Front.

The Chilean Popular Front was a historic coalition that for the first time anywhere in the Americas brought together the Socialist Party and the Communist Party in a broad governing coalition. When we tie together those two historical moments in the 1930s and ’40s and the 1970s, we gain a new perspective for thinking about the Popular Unity years as more than a simple footnote to the Cold War. The struggle over food as a right of citizenship certainly illuminates this longer history of what the Popular Unity revolution was all about.

NA

You mention in the book that Salvador Allende was minister of health in the Popular Front government in 1939. In a way, that’s one of the most interesting contrasts between Chile and, say, Brazil or Argentina. In the 1930s or ’40s, many of Latin America’s populist governments had a similar agenda of pursuing redistribution policies and explicitly trying to tackle the issue of working-class nutrition and consumption. But Chile seems unique in that the issue of working-class nutrition was — and remained for decades — a banner of the socialist left.
JF-S

That’s right. If you look at Brazil, Argentina, or Mexico in the 1920s and ’30s, the story of the state’s trying to protect or guarantee popular consumption looks similar throughout Latin America. What happened in Chile is somewhat distinct in that, as you say, it was the political left — socialists, communists, progressive Catholics — that adopted these sorts of demands and put them at the center of their political programs.

Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil had more traditionally populist programs — they didn’t identify with the Left so much as they did with a more ambiguous nationalist agenda. By contrast, there was a much stronger ideological component to consumption demands in Chile, because movements like the Communist Party and Socialist Party very deliberately understood these issues to be part of their organizing efforts and their vision of a socialist society very early in the twentieth century.

The idea of guaranteeing a basic right to food or protecting popular nutrition may not itself be an inherently “leftist” idea, but leftist parties in Chile made it so by using consumption demands to reach both the growing urban working class and those in an even more precarious position. Many rural workers in the 1930s moved from the Chilean countryside to the cities, and consumption politics became a way of attracting them into the broad tent of the political left as well.
NA

Before we get deeper into the history of the Chilean left and how it made popular nutrition its flagship cause, there’s a particular idea in Hungry for Revolution that resonates powerfully today. Food, as your book shows so well, is an unusual commodity in that it is strongly associated both with social necessity and economic freedom: there are all kinds of twentieth-century policies like state planning, price controls, and production quotas aimed precisely to guarantee basic food access for populations. But food is also at the center of powerful ideas about consumer choice, pleasure, and basic market freedoms.
JF-S

The anthropologist Sidney Mintz wrote about this when he argued that food was an interesting lens to look at society through because it puts into relief two tensions. On the one hand, people want state regulations to protect their physical health, safety, and the affordability of basic foods. At the same time, food also highlights the issue of individual choice: consumers don’t want to be told what to eat and how to eat. People often think that the kitchen table is a protected private space, and any state attempt to tell people what to eat or how to eat has, in different moments, been met with protest.

Food historian Rachel Laudan uses the idea of “culinary modernism” to refer to a similar tension between need and choice; her concept emphasizes how general living standards and consumer well-being has improved when states have harnessed modern technology to make the food more accessible and food production less laborious. This is basically the story of the first five chapters of Hungry for Revolution, where all the different left-wing Chilean political movements throughout history were trying to regulate the economy and adopt new technological and scientific understandings of nutrition to meet working people’s basic needs and demands.

At that point, from the 1930s to 1970s, there was not a huge debate about providing a wide array of consumer options to people. It was really about establishing quantitative or measurable metrics, and making sure workers had access to, for example, enough calories, proper sources of protein, and eventually things like fruits and vegetables and milk — things that fell under the broad category of what were called “protective foods”.

If we look at Salvador Allende’s nutrition policies, his focus on food during the Popular Unity years was very much a continuation of this tradition. He made milk accessible to Chilean children, and famously, when there were beef shortages in Chile, Allende asked people to eat fish instead because it was a simple way of substituting one protein for another.

In practice, the politics of this proved more challenging. During the Popular Unity revolution there were also major food protests over shortages of very specific types of goods. Though there was not famine like you could see in other parts of the world in the early twentieth century, when goods that consumers had learned to associate with a “good life” were in short supply, they became objects of protest. People had come to expect beef and didn’t want to eat a substitute, even if nutrition scientists said a substitute like fish was just as good, if not better.

Hence, many of the anti-Allende protests were organized around the idea of choice. Protest leaders began to emphasize that choice and the ability to have consumer options should be the new metric by which the proper functioning of a consumer society should be measured. And that mentality highlights the formation of a social base that was opposed to Allende and that later, in the post-Allende period, supported the policies of neoliberalism.

By focusing on struggles around consumption during the Popular Unity revolution, you begin to see how a base of support for what would become neoliberalism came into existence — not necessarily among workers and the urban or rural poor, but that message really resonated among middle-class sectors. It’s also there that we find society turning away from thinking about collective needs and focusing on government policies that emphasize choice as the be-all and end-all of the economy.
NA

Perhaps we should take a step back and review the long history of the Chilean left leading up to the Allende years. Why was hunger such an issue in early twentieth-century Chile in the first place? How did hunger become not just a social issue, but a left-wing one?
JF-S

I spend the first couple chapters of the book really addressing that question. As the book argues, hunger was a central way in which political movements articulated the “social question” and made their demands on the state.

It’s important to understand that this idea of hunger is really a social or political construction. It’s not necessarily an objective or static condition that people were experiencing in any one moment so much as it became a political language that was constructed based on perceived experiences.

Chile had very interesting connections to the global economy at the turn of the twentieth century: it was actually the provider for much of the mineral fertilizer that fueled the rise of agricultural — and, by extension, consumer — abundance in other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chilean nitrates mined from the Atacama Desert were a fuel for the rise of intensive agricultural practices, especially in the United States and Europe at that time.

There, in the Atacama Desert, Chilean nitrate miners came to understand their poor living and working conditions in relation to the abundance they were producing. They saw their own experience of exploitation in the scarcity and high cost of foodstuffs, and time and again pointed this out through protests against the state and private capitalists.

When the nitrate economy went bust, initially after World War I and then definitively after the Great Depression, those workers ended up migrating to urban areas of Chile, particularly the capital Santiago. And hunger quickly became a rallying cry for some of the first social and political movements that took center stage in those developing urban environments. There’s a fascinating political movement that emerged right after World War I, the National Workers’ Assembly for Nutrition (Asamblea Obrera de Alimentación Nacional, AOAN), which mobilized against high food prices and, among other things, called for state-backed price controls on key consumer goods. These demonstrations were some of the largest in twentieth-century Chilean history.

The AOAN went beyond this, though. It was one of the first movements to make political demands for comprehensive agrarian reform, for major tax reforms so that certain scarce goods could enter Chile more easily from abroad, and so that basic consumer goods would not leave Chile as exports but rather be diverted to urban consumers. Many of those demands were actually met in 1932, when Chile became the first country anywhere in the hemisphere to establish a permanent national price control office. This predates, for example, the Office of Price Administration in the United States, which was the price control office created as part of the New Deal in 1941, as World War II was kicking into high gear.

I argue in the book that the AOAN was the movement that provided both the political and economic model for the Popular Front in the 1930s — which, later in the book, I try to show was the precursor to Allende’s Popular Unity coalition. The AOAN was a place where socialists, communists, and anarchists all joined together for the first time.
NA

This is a bit tangential, but since you mentioned the New Deal: some of the things we’re talking about remind me of policies proposed by Henry A. Wallace, the progressive politician who served as secretary of agriculture during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Is that just a coincidence?

JF-S

Actually, I think Henry Wallace’s vision of a global New Deal was similar to what many Chileans in the Popular Front period were calling for in the late 1930s and early 1940s: a kind of hemispheric New Deal. Many Chilean reformers — especially given their support for US war efforts — even expected something like that to happen after World War II.

Even if that didn’t happen, I like to think that what did happen in Chile — especially from the 1960s forward, and particularly with agrarian reform and then Allende being elected — as really the fulfillment of Henry Wallace’s vision: a system rooted in economic democracy, where there’s increased popular participation by both rural and urban workers to ensure that every Chilean had, to paraphrase Wallace’s words, a quart of milk each day. Wallace’s dream was deferred and ultimately eclipsed in the United States, but one could argue that it lived on in interesting ways through the mid-century Latin American left.

Wallace in fact did make a fascinating visit to Chile in 1943 and was greeted like a king. The historian Jody Pavilack has a chapter on this in her book Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile’s Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War, which is about coal miners during the Popular Front period. Wallace was beloved by the political left in Chile, and Wallace actually held up Chile during the Popular Front years as a symbol of what social and economic democracy could look like in the Americas.
NA

Getting back to Chile and the early twentieth century: I know during that period there were episodic instances of working-class activity focused on consumption and reproduction — the 1907 tenant strike in Buenos Aires is a famous example. But the Chilean movement seems exceptional both for its intensity and durability.
JF-S

Yes, there were all types of different consumer leagues that started in the 1930s in Chile and around the Americas. Again, those were the years leading up to the election of the Chilean Popular Front, a period when militants of different left-leaning political parties, and women in particular, went out to survey the consumer marketplace to make sure that price controls were being followed by shopkeepers. In certain instances, they themselves actually expropriated and redistributed goods that were being hoarded or not sold at the proper prices by shopkeepers. These actions represented one model of participatory or direct economic democracy.

Later, approaching the mid-twentieth century, as Chile’s developmental welfare state took shape, state officials began to work with scientists, engineers, and agricultural experts to implement food and nutrition policies. These welfare and regulatory policies were a response to earlier citizen mobilizations, but at the same time, they were an attempt to contain the power of social movements that had organized around issues of food justice and equity.

In a sense, the Popular Unity years were proof that citizen mobilization around food had not subsided or been wholly contained. This was most evident in the 1970s with the creation of neighborhood price inspection boards, known as Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios (Committees of Supplies and Prices), or JAPs. The JAPs were exemplary of what was known as “poder popular” or popular power during the Popular Unity revolution, and it’s important to see the origins of those left-wing experiments with direct economic participation and forms of consumer-based economic democracy in the prior decades. It was then that consumers first took on the role that they wanted the state to handle.
NA

As you said, by the time we reach the 1950s and the heyday of the Latin American developmentalist state, that regulatory role for nutrition and food access had been reabsorbed by the Chilean state. It also seems like it was in that period that we find the first explicit recognition — at least by the Chilean state — of a strategic connection between agrarian reform and improved living standards of the urban masses.
JF-S

Yes, I think the history of food and consumption gives us a new historical understanding of why and how the developmentalist state, or social welfare state, emerged as it did in Latin America. Still, food policies and consumer regulation were explicitly understood, at least by agents of the state, as a way to contain potential popular political unrest that had already been made very evident by earlier political mobilizations in Chile.

It’s against that background that we find in Chile the creation of numerous state agencies whose purpose was to calculate how many calories, proteins, fruits, vegetables, and milk that different sectors of the population needed to consume. It then became the job of other agencies to implement productive policies that made it more possible for Chile to meet those nutritional needs through domestic production, as opposed to depending on food imports from abroad.

Similar to the containment efforts targeting urban social movements, by the 1950s and early ’60s, the push for agrarian reform — at least as far as the state was concerned — was seen as a way of containing rural working populations that were beginning to exercise greater and greater political power through unionization drives and land occupations.

To be sure, rural workers’ mobilization helped bring the need for agrarian reform center stage. But urban reformers, following the work of structuralist economists in the 1950s and early 1960s, were also adamant that land redistribution would improve domestic food production. And more efficient domestic food production meant lower food prices and less dependence on foreign food imports.

The structuralist economic interpretation of underdevelopment began to hinge on making the rural countryside more productive, producing enough food for urban consumers so that foreign exchange could buy other industrial technologies in the international marketplace. Food sovereignty was a prerequisite for greater economic sovereignty and economic modernity.

That’s one way to think about agrarian reform. There was also a debate taking place among structuralist economists in the 1950s and ’60s about the origins of consumer inflation. Inflation is this kind of boogeyman throughout twentieth-century Chilean history, and the economists who were gathered at places like the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) were arguing that inflation is primarily driven by a low supply of food and rising demand; that is, that the disequilibrium between those two is making food and other consumer goods increasingly expensive, and that there was a necessity to increase supply to bring it closer in line with growing urban demand.
NA

It’s also in that part of the book that you show how Chilean state agencies began to talk about consumer behavior and population statistics in a more technocratic way, using terms like “model consumers” that, to my ears, sound a bit like the language of the World Bank.
JF-S

Absolutely, and they used that kind of language especially when talking about women as consumers. Many reformers saw women, as the heads of households, as the cause of nutritional problems. The Popular Front and its supporters were certainly also guilty of using some very gendered, heteronormative language in their pursuit of better nutritional outcomes.

In fact, as the Cold War began, around 1946 or ’47, women began to be seen pretty much exclusively as a problem, so that the state’s goal was to alter women’s consumer habits: what they buy, what they feed their families, and so on. In resolving that problem, it was thought, you could get the country on better developmental footing. Obviously, that’s a very limited and depoliticized vision of women’s political agency, and ultimately, it proved to be an attempt to demobilize women politically after a Popular-Front-style Chilean feminist movement had organized them in the late 1930s and ’40s.
NA

Although they would recover some type of agency again in the Allende years, through women-led popular institutions like the Price Boards, right? As you already alluded to before, the long arc of Chilean socialism comes into particularly sharp relief when we follow the specific theme of food and nutrition politics.

JF-S

That’s right. The various dimensions of Chile’s food struggles set the stage for Allende’s Popular Unity revolution. With the benefit of historical distance, we might even say that the early 1970s were a kind of culminating moment in Chilean history. When viewed through the lens of food, you really see how these different economic justice struggles came to a head. I like to think of the Popular Unity period as an attempt to resolve some of the earlier contradictions that had built up throughout the history of the Chilean left.

Allende’s acceleration of agrarian reform was a case in point. Building on the work and ideas of his predecessors, Allende tried very concertedly to meet demands of urban consumers while at the same time meeting the demands for land and better working conditions being raised by rural peasants. Guaranteeing better living conditions, better working conditions, while also trying to ramp up economic production in the countryside so urban consumers have enough to eat — that’s a very difficult balancing act to pull off.

So, Allende was trying to resolve a whole series of things at once, and actually, for the first year of his government, he had considerable success, at least economically. There was a year of tremendous abundance that is too often forgotten, or overshadowed, by the difficult months that preceded the 1973 coup. During the Popular Unity’s first year in power, Allende successfully raised working-class wages and raised agricultural production when it came to Chile’s most essential goods. The supermarkets were well-stocked and other stores selling consumer goods were abundantly supplied — people were generally quite happy. For these reasons, 1971 is sometimes referred to as a “fiesta de consumo” (consumer party).

Popular Unity ran into trouble as its second year in power began. Inflation started to creep up again; there were increasing shortages for essential goods like beef, but also a lot of imported goods; and the United States was blocking Chile’s access to new credit, making it much more difficult to import goods from abroad. There also were growing tensions within Allende’s coalition about the best way to push the revolution forward: whether it was better to radicalize the revolution and give political power to its grassroots base, or to consolidate at the top by making gestures of peace and reconciliation to middle sectors — the Christian Democrats, in particular — and push forward with a more sort of top-down revolution.

Again, the history of food offers an interesting window to think about that tension between a top-down revolution and a bottom-up revolution. But even more than that, the struggle for food fueled this tension — or at the very least was an arena in which this tension played out.

The primary example in the Popular Unity years was the JAPs — the neighborhood price and supply boards — that carried out similar functions of neighborhood consumer inspection as the consumer leagues of the 1930s and ’40s. The JAPs diverged from the Popular Front experience in that they were not only monitoring things that were going on in the consumer marketplace but actually directed distribution channels as well. Food from agrarian reform settlements was being given to these boards by state distribution companies to distribute directly to peripheral or underserved urban communities.

Through the price and supply boards, Popular Unity militants were actually rethinking the logistical system or supply chain by which food and consumer essentials moved through the economy. They were reconsidering the relationships that connected production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. But as these groups gained more power and independence, Allende and his top officials became concerned that they were losing their grip over the speed and direction of the revolution.
NA

That vacillation between a top-down and bottom-up revolution seems to have been a tragic hallmark of the Popular Unity government. Do you think that indecisiveness was his Achilles heel, that is, Allende’s indecision about whether to expand the ruling coalition toward the Christian Democrats or give more power to independent working-class institutions like the ones we’re talking about?
JF-S

I think that there was a belief on the part of Allende and his closest advisers that economic change or structural reform alone could produce all the other changes that society needed; that he could just fulfill these pent-up demands for consumption and material security and then that would pave the road to more profound social changes at some point down the road.

But Allende struggled to understand the necessity of implementing major political changes too. He never dismantled the political power held by opposition sectors in the Congress; the landowner interests still had an incredible amount of power there, as well as in the judiciary, and he was very hesitant to embrace popular power and give more decision-making power to local communities, workers, grassroots organization, and so on. Allende was very intent on maintaining the political and constitutional architecture of the country intact while he focused instead on economic restructuring.
NA

And then, of course, there was the political opposition. Your book is interesting because it sets aside the familiar actors — the Chicago Boys, Henry Kissinger, the CIA, trucker strikes, hoarders, economic saboteurs — to put the spotlight on Chilean middle sectors and show how their ideas of consumption fed directly into the coup and its aftermath.
JF-S

The counterrevolutionary actors that became well known during the Pinochet dictatorship really began to organize in the final years of the Popular Unity revolution. It was then that right-wing middle- and upper-class women, as consumers and guardians of the household economy, began to make demands for Allende to step down from office. It was also the moment when middlemen and distributors became very upset with alternative channels of food and consumer distribution, and they too began to call for Allende to be removed from power. And then there were the landowners, who were very upset about their agricultural lands being expropriated by the state and redistributed to small landowners.

So, there was a confluence of consumers, distributors, and producers cohering into an oppositional bloc against Allende, and it was that social base that Pinochet and the Chicago Boys, his neoliberal economic advisers, came to rely upon after the coup in an attempt to legitimate their program. They provided economic ideas and a new program to this already existing constituency of disillusioned, very frustrated social and political actors in Chile.

This is all meant to complicate a bit the more simplistic narrative about an omnipotent United States in the broader Cold War context, coming in and simply toppling a popular, democratically elected government in Chile without Chilean actors playing a key role. The government of Allende was certainly popular at different moments, and it was certainly democratically elected. But as a historian, I think it is important to also recognize that Allende faced a sizable domestic opposition — and we need more research about the ideas around which that opposition organized and united itself. Having women homemakers, small and large distributors, shopkeepers, and landowners in the same political coalition was quite unprecedented for the time.
NA

One thing that has stuck with me throughout our discussion is how slippery the idea of “abundance” really is. Capitalism teaches us that our idea of abundance should be as boundless as our wildest consumer desires; meanwhile, Allende tried to convince Chileans that a nutritious meal was its own form of abundance — even if steak was not on the menu. Now that the Left is back in power in Chile and Gabriel Boric has promised to turn a set of basic social and economic goods into inalienable rights, do you think it’s important to look back at what Allende did right or wrong?
JF-S

I think Allende’s vision of socialism remained overly rooted in a belief that economic change was all that was needed to set the stage for broader social or political changes. When it came to food, Allende didn’t fully appreciate how both hunger and abundance were shaped by more than just economic factors; the meanings of both hunger and abundance were constructed through political struggle and evolved over the course of the twentieth century.

Allende sometimes had a static understanding of abundance as this thing out there that one could eventually reach or obtain. For food, it was about reaching satisfactory levels of caloric intake, satisfactory levels of protein consumption, and so on. He rarely considered the importance of culture in food politics — that certain foods have social significance or that taste can become political.

I think some of Allende’s critics on the Left — people who often were a part of the revolutionary Left, as well as progressive Catholics — had begun by 1973 to be critical of the idea that consumer abundance was achievable in the short term, or that this should be the primary focus of the revolution. Some on the Left began to talk about how the revolution needed to think about a new ethics of consumption that focused on other things like restraint and sacrifice.

The Christian Left as well as the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR), which was not part of the Popular Unity coalition, began arguing with increasing force that Allende needed to also focus his attention on dismantling the sources of political power that stood behind the old system — that economic change alone would not be sustainable as long as the political power and influence of those who controlled the economy were allowed to persist.

One could argue that this was a tragic lesson of Allende’s overthrow: that unless you think about the political and economic dimensions of a revolution together, the old system will remain intact, in one way or another.

Today, I think that many on the Chilean left — particularly those who first coalesced in the Apruebo Dignidad coalition before the October 2020 plebiscite to rewrite Chile’s constitution and who have now elected Gabriel Boric as president — have learned some important lessons from the Popular Unity years. Most notably, Chile today is in the process of writing a new constitution. This is something that Allende always hesitated to pursue.

If you go back to the 2011 student movement in Chile, or even before, with the high school student movement of 2007, you can see the emergence of a politics oriented around decommodifying education, health care, and housing, and a growing awareness that none of that can be accomplished in a lasting way under the current political system.

There’s a real understanding on the contemporary Chilean left that the political architecture of the country needs to change so that economic reforms can be sustained and consolidated. The historic nature of what we’re seeing right now in Chile should not be underestimated.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joshua Frens-String is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (University of California Press, 2021).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Nicolas Allen is a Jacobin contributing editor and the managing editor at Jacobin América Latina.