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      ‘To work more, produce more and defend the revolution’: Copper workers from socialism to neoliberalism

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            Abstract

            On 11 July 1971, Chile’s National Congress, in a historic vote, unanimously approved reforming the constitution, which opened the door to nationalise the large-scale copper industry. Traditional historical accounts of the nationalisation of copper had emphasised a history of negotiations between foreign capital and the Chilean government, documenting how economists and political leaders experimented with different approaches to obtain a share of the profits from the country’s most valuable commodity. By focusing exclusively on the political economy, however, scholars have overlooked the role of workers during and after the process of nationalisation and failed to account for why copper miners continued to fight to protect a state-owned company. Influenced by Peter Winn’s Weavers of Revolution and recent studies on people’s experience during the Popular Unity (UP) era, this article looks at the nationalisation of copper from below. It analyses how workers fought for, understood and experienced the nationalisation; how the UP transformed labour relations at the local level; and how the military, after 1973, redesigned the state company. By placing workers at the centre of the nationalisation, this article can help better understand its importance as a matter of both political economy and workers’ power and explain why the copper mines became the first site of labour resistance against the military regime.

            Author and article information

            Journal
            RA
            Radical Americas
            UCL Press
            2399-4606
            01 June 2021
            : 6
            : 1
            : 5
            Affiliations
            [1 ]PhD Candidate, Harvard University, Robinson Hall, Cambridge, MA, USA
            [2 ]Professor of History, California State University Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
            Author notes
            Article
            RA-6-5
            10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.005
            a9efd0d2-ec3a-4997-a7f4-03f962b39ebe
            © 2021, Georgia Whitaker and Ángela Vergara.

            This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.005.

            History
            : 14 September 2020
            : 21 February 2021
            Page count
            Pages: 10
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            Commentary
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            Whitaker, G., Vergara, Á. ‘“To work more, produce more and defend the revolution”: Copper workers from socialism to neoliberalism’. Radical Americas 6, 1 (2021): 5. DOI: 10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.005.

            Sociology,Political science,Anglo-American studies,Americas,Cultural studies,History
            Chile,labour history,unions,socialism,neoliberalism,copper,dictatorship,nationalism,Cold War

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