This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile and the tragic end of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. A time for remembrance, it is also an opportunity to explore lesser-known episodes from Chile’s thousand-day experiment in social democratic governance.

One of those episodes, now coming to light, concerns Allende’s efforts to nationalize Chile’s culture industry and create an innovative, democratic mass consumer society. For example, several important studies have recovered the history of Editora Nacional Quimantú. Nationalized by the Popular Unity government, this state-owned publishing house aimed to produce inexpensive editions of great global literature and intellectual works, with the ultimate goal of integrating them into the wider cultural heritage of the working class.

One of the Popular Unity government’s more ambitious projects centered on the nationalization of RCA, the American electronic consumer goods giant. By buying out a controlling share in the company’s stock, Allende believed the company — renamed Industry de Radio y Televisión (IRT) — could manufacture “socialist radios and TVs.” Drawing on the benefits of modern technology, it was believed that these modern consumer technologies — similar to the famous Cybersyn project — could help integrate society into a holistic national project, different from the bourgeois individualism of consumer capitalism.