The Consumer and the Commisar: Making Economic Citizenship in Chile in the Age of Social Democracy

Many of the social welfare policies and programs that were implemented across the Americas during the years surrounding the global economic crisis of the 1930s aimed at guaranteeing the rights of workers at the workplace. However, another set of policies sought to guarantee minimum standards of consumption for workers and their families, often playing just as important a role in defining the meaning of the welfare state for numerous thousands of citizens, in Latin America and beyond. This paper, part of a larger project on the role of consumption politics in the making of democratic socialism in Chile, explores the place of the consumer in the making of Chile’s Popular Front, a broad based coalition of socialists, communists, and middle class reformers that was elected to power in 1938 and would govern Chile through the 1940s. In particular, the paper highlights how three focuses of state policy under the Popular Front -- popular nutrition, consumer price control, and the state-backed development of national food production – helped define the practice of social welfare for many Chilean workers. Using documents from Latin America’s first price control agency and the region’s first state-backed development agency, I draw from what historians have called the “everyday forms of state formation” or “state-building from the bottom-up" to show how both the politics of everyday life and the interface of grassroots movements with state institutions helped put consumer claims at the center of the debate about social and economic democracy, concepts that would be at the forefront of Chile’s advance toward an historic experiment in democratic socialism three decades later.