Venezuela

Abstract

When Romulo Gallegos published Doha Barbara in 1929, some seventy-five percent of the population of Venezuela lived in the countryside, twenty-five percent in the cities and major towns. The dominant economic form was still the traditional latifundio, the dominant economic activity production of agricultural commodities (sugar, coffee, cacao, beef, hides) for export. In the last half century, because of a very rapid and uneven process of capitalist industrialization, a demographic mutation has taken place. At present, eighty percent of the population of Venezuela (which has roughly quadrupled since 1927) is located in the urban sector, and of this eighty percent, sixty percent is concentrated in eight large cities. The capital city of Caracas has grown from a somewhat bucolic colonial city of two or three-hundred thousand residents to a metropolitan labyrinth with a population of over three million today. Concurrently, the dominant economic sectors have shifted from agriculture to the advanced technologies of the oil and iron ore extractive industries and to import-substitution manufacturing and merchandising enterprises, some under private, others under state ownership. The urban population is articulated into a new spectrum of class relationships by the economic shift: industrial, state, and financial elite; urban petty bourgeoisie; white-collar middle strata of bureaucrats, technicians, and professionals; a partly unionized blue-collar proletariat; and, most strikingly, the extensive subproletariat of the mnchos (shanty towns), the so-called marginal population driven off the countryside but not yet integrated into the capitalist labor market.