The Venezuelan society has been formed as an unequal process, that which is not anything surprising and she/he responds besides to the traditional historical influences, like part of the Spanish empire, to others that are derived of the influence of the petroleum. The Venezuelan society has been mainly view from the historical angle as a succession of events in the time or as the result or effect of certain decisive factors. But they have not been plentiful the visions that gather the interaction of the facts and influences, in areas like those of culture, economy and politics among other, by no means those that attribute importance to the way of living, to the habits and daily uses.
This is the focus from which is presented a topic here that for itself it could constitute an encyclopedic effort. The original approaches to the topic fed of the anecdotic evocation or memorialista, for annotations, travelers' observations or foreign columnists, the most famous of which it was Alejandro of Humboldt. They were the positivistas who from ends of the XIX century and especially in the current one, they began a more rigorous debate on the configuration and substance of the society. Later, the Marxists have rehearsed their methodology, which puts emphasis has more than enough partial lines of the historical process. New sociologists, influenced by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Schumpeter, Talcott Parsons, among other, they have incorporated to the analysts. Also those that from the angle of the theory of the dependence, of so much popularization in Latin America, from the decade of 1960, they insert the social process of the country inside the rigorous molds of the international economy and the subordination relationships that originate in them. In half of the decade of 1980 the Venezuelan society offers a varied and complex square to the eyes of the analysts, especially for the uses, customs, habits and tensions of the urban society, the indexes of crime rate, the transculturación phenomenons, internal and external migratory movements, the political violence and non politics, the drugs, the characteristics of the consumption and above everything, the impact of the wealth originated by the oil entrance. Without forgetting that it would not be integral the perception of the contemporary Venezuelan society without relating it with the political system, the one which, from 1958, it has accumulated a significant degree of stability. The investigation on the Venezuelan society is deepened especially with the contribution and the anthropologists' contribution, the specialists in nutrition, the geographers, criminologists, historians, politólogos, economists and the whole numerous family of experts in the social sciences. There is a constant and growing flow of data, investigations, queries, dedicated all to enrich this vision.
Identity, rupture, continuity, homogeneización, unification
An exam of the Venezuelan society should look toward the lines of continuity and rupture, identity and conflict, homogeneity and unification. During the colonial period the tension among the classes, chaste and estamentos occupied great part of the scenario. The peninsular and Creole targets, the mestizos, the brown ones and the Indians, had serious distancings to each other which were reflected in the violence that you/they acquired the War of Independence so much (1810-1823) as the Federal War (1859-1863). at the end of the XVIII century, the counties that formed the general captaincy and that later they constituted the Republic of Venezuela they had an approximate population of 800.000 inhabitants, divided globally this way: 400.000 brown (50%), 200.000 targets (25%), 120.000 Indians (14%) dispersed and around 64.000 slaves (8%). The biggest demographic concentration took place in that that later was the northcentral region of the whole country and in smaller degree in parts of the plain (current states Cojedes, Portuguese, Barinas and Hurry); the population of African origin grouped predominantly in the center of the territory. This demographic structure, basically related with part of the geography, without active communication among the diverse regions, for the obvious territorial isolation, she/he didn't come to acquire a relative administrative unit but after 1776-1777, when they are integrated in the Intendency of Army and Real Treasury and the General Captaincy, that which was consequence of the centralizing politics of the Borbones. The national identity, however, spreads to be formed in the war, nevertheless that great part of her was a civil, domestic conflict, I intern, among the classes that you/they had been born in the colonial order. But the War of Independence produces a rupture which constitutes central piece in the social evolution and later politics. The national conscience is born of the political rupture with Spain. For the tactical ends of the military episodes and for the strategic of the war that rupture was accountable. Venezuela left the unit of the Spanish empire and immediately it began to depend on the world Anglo-Saxon capitalist. The centrifugal tendencies, atomizadoras, pulverizantes, of the society postcolonial, began to flow from all the sides. The commanders embodied the centrifugal force.
The search of the identity has been a continuous desire of the Spanish American countries after the independence. This inquiry has a lot to do with the perplexity created by the separation of Spain. She/he has sometimes concentrated on one alone of the historical periods or in an alone of the races that you/they compose the miscegenation. That usually makes forget that the Latin American man is the product of an entirety of cultural influences and of historical times that are not excluded but rather they sink and they are integrated. The identity is been of the group. Inside those estimates it is important to be interrogated about the continuity of the process historical Venezuelan. There is who value more the rupture lines that those of continuity. From the social point of view there is not doubt that the separation war interrupts a normal course of predictable events and that it alters the bases of the society. After 1810 the war imposes a degree of violence, of contradiction, of conflict and tension among what you/they were the breeds and colonial estamentos and the conflict has a devastating effect. When it finishes the war, by the middle of the decade of 1820, the old general captaincy was irreconocible, it was this way of big the destruction, impoverishment and interference originated by the war. The War of Independence promoted the social ascent of those who had formed the armies. The property of the earth obtained as compensation by the merits and sacrifices in the fight concentrated on some favored, several of which would also exercise the political power, like it was the case of José Antonio Páez, the siblings José Tadeo and José Gregorio Monagas and others. But for that reason the social desajustes was not solved the levels of inequality since they continued after the establishment of the Republic in 1830. In front of the urban country that looked for formulas of civil commitment it emerges another more extensive reality and impredecible, of clear rural root that enters continually in front of the prevailing political system and that it ends up destroying it definitively in 1863, with the culmination of the Federal War. It is this the most representative in the Venezuelan rebellions. Social conflict of great proportion and duration, because it is developed during the years that you/they go from 1859 to 1863 and it ends up destroying the few bases that they were of the colonial economy. The Venezuela of ends of the XIX century didn't want to resemble in anything that of 1830, 1840 or 1850. The country wanted to be born again and to divide clearly the different periods of the history as if doesn't exist any continuity. And although this also happened with the Independence, she/he suits to wonder, if in spite of everything, the unavoidable continuities were not bigger than the discontinuities. If the man, the culture, the economy, the behavior, were the habits, same how it could be different the history that artificially is made be born a certain day? She/he can that they are deceiving some appearances. It is certain, for example that frequently were repealed, they were reformed or they modified the constitutions. But for that reason it didn't change the reality of the political system, no matter how much yes they can be different features among the call later conservative Republic to 1830 and the liberal of 1850 or the autocratic of 1870. The general characteristics of the society and of the production systems, of the work habits and of the political culture, they suffered less alterations than those announced for you proclaim, manifestos and speeches, samples more than the rhetoric that of the realities of the social change.
The rupture and the continuity are this way 2 essential facts in the history and in the interpretation of the Venezuelan society. One is not able to, therefore, to attempt a definition of the national identity without an integrative look about the entirety of the components. Neither she/he should forget, neither, the unification process and integration of the country. Venezuela arose of the unification of separate counties some of others for the dispositions of the Spanish State. A first stage unificadora was fulfilled in the final decades of the XVIII century the creation of the Intendency, the General Captaincy and the Real Audience, all with headquarters in Caracas, and the elevation of the bishopric of Caracas to archbishopric at the beginning of the XIX century. Another during the War of Independence whose more excellent fact from the strategic point of view was the estimate made by Simón Bolívar that it could not triumph if it didn't look for a territorial geographical center. It should be a political and logistical-military reference point. That was Narrowness. The plain was a scenario but also a nucleus of supply. The association of Bolivar and Páez were an alliance with the reality of the territory. The effect unifier of the war is certain from this point of view. But also from others. Nation ideas, of homeland, of unit geographical-politics didn't really exist, not only for the lack of communication and the physical isolation but because conceptually each county was separated from the other ones. The national unit is always a process. At the beginning it can be inspired by an abstraction or in an ideal. But so that she/he makes sense she/he has to be a real fact, based on the necessity of communicating for an end and of uniting with a permanent intention. The national unit can not be abstract. The sea, the coast, was the first reality of Venezuela. For her the conquest began, after Christopher Columbus arrival. Later the colonization remains in connection with the coast. The first military defenses were, before everything, an answer of coastal country, invadible for the sea, in a time in that the Spanish empire faced the powerful rivalry of French, British and Dutch. On the other hand, the colonization looked for the most favorable lands to cultivate the exportable fruits and that they had external market, independently of the economic absolutism of the Spanish State that was during a lot of time a restrictive factor. The valleys between the coastal mountain ranges and the plain were favorable, healthy, fertile, sheltered, with enough water. In the height of the mountain ranges there were also appropriate regions. But during a lot of time the political process decreases to part of the occident and of the coastal east and the plain. Rivalries and interregional tensions were reflected on the political behavior of the nation. I study slow, unequal, contradictory. The center, that is to say, leaves of what was the county of Caracas, which undertook several of the current states (Miranda, Aragua, Carabobo and Cojedes) they were subjected to the rural pressures that came from the occident, of the east and of the plain. When at the end of the XIX century, already in the threshold of the XX century, a group of audacious Andean soldiers invades the center and she/he appropriates of the central commands of the power, the nation finishes being integrated, with a curious incidental effect: the parts that composed the traditional geography win in cohesion from the Andean assault. Later on, the roads and the media like the automobile, the truck, the bus, the radio and lastly the airplane and the television finish rounding the circle of the integration and of the national cohesion. The impact of the railroad, present from the last 2 decades of the XIX century, was not remarkable because except for the roads that communicated to each other to The Guaira, Caracas, Valencia and Puerto Cabello, the other lines were unconnected and on the other hand the development ferrocarrilero was truncated by the competition of the highway and of the self-driven vehicle, although both means of transport had been able to and due to supplement.
The new generations have received the unification like a natural fact. They don't always perceive that it has been an accumulative, contradictory and sometimes traumatic historical fact. The unification becomes even with another excellent fact: the centralization. Venezuela is a centralist State in spite of the definition that she/he offers the effective Constitution. She/he says this in their article 2º: «Venezuela is a federal State in the terms settled down in this constitution». The centralization influences vastly in the behavior of the society. It displaces the decisions up and toward the center. This fact rebounds in the economy, since the industries and the production sources and of employment they spread to concentrate on an area of the territory, not only because there the biggest population volume is but because there they take the decisions. All that moves away from the capital, is also distanced of the influence and of the pressure. The electrification has neutralized this circumstance a little, since the industries can be located this way more and more far. On the other hand, the efforts administrative descentralizadores have not had bigger success, like she/he seems to come off of the performance of most of the regional corporations created in the last century room. From a sociological point of view, the centralization has contributed to the urbanization, but in a peculiar way. The population that groups in cities is not consequence of the industrialization but of the mass in search of diverse opportunities. In the time on that you/they concentrated the public works in Caracas (1948-1958) a lot of people moved to the capital. Later the urbanization was consequence of the undertaken agrarian political relative failure of the different ones and of the first floor production levels and of productivity in the field. However, in the last years this tendency something has been braked, due to diverse causes, among which the presence of the arisen populated centers of the agrarian reformation is counted, as well as the increase of the agricultural production in volume and remuneration. In spite of this, the process of the urban mass has been, largely, ruralización of the cities because the peasant that emigrates of the interior transports with him his habits without changing them for those of the urban culture. To the desubicarse it is eradicated of their Ecology, of their system of life and of their affective atmosphere. This produces a very common trauma in the big urban areas of Suramérica and of the Third World, in some of which contradiction phenomenons take place and of social violence, of crime rate and insecurity, more and more notorious. The anthropology of the cities of Venezuela constitutes an indispensable assistant of its sociological spectrum now. An inhabitant exists, but not always a wrapped up citizen really in the political and economic system. People that groups without a true connection with the production mechanisms and of solidarity it forms not integrated behavior modules. The previous advances toward the integration and the national unit come later to be braked or blocked by this circumstance. Not made less important than the previous ones it is the progress registered in the homogeneización of the country. Venezuela is today a more homogeneous country, outside of its marginalidad areas; and perhaps it could be thought that even these conserve certain common features, for different that is the geographical origin of their components. Vertebral element in the homogeneización has been the television. The press and the radio had made a good journey in this sense, but she/he came to be the image with their powerful reach the one that has strengthened something that could call you the national semblance. There is today a Venezuelan type, woman and man, more and more similar, with habits and more similar behavior, with suits, styles and inflections of the less different voice. The consumption of drugs has expanded being created this way similar problems in the different regions. The type of delinquency is also nationalized, that is to say, she/he extends to be made less regional and more typical. The changes in the voice, in the ways of articulating the words and of the intonation, they coincide with certain unification in the youth's language, which is partly, derived of expressions coded by the subculture of the national or international underworld. Still made not studied sufficiently but evidently important in a nation in which the youth forms more than half of the population. The traditional suit of the Venezuelan has changed. The bluejeans is not accidental testimony of a subculture but tendency to the simplification in universal terms. The import of this style coincides with a climatic element: the ambient temperature has ascended in the cities. The urban infrastructure, the limitation or reduction of the green areas, the traffic of automobiles, and in general, the whole surface movement, they have gone making a more rigorous tropical climate. The cost of the life, on the other hand, converts some of the traditional garments of dressing in deluxe articles. The informality in the habits, easier of extending in a basically equitable society, she/he is reflected clearly in the type of dress of the Venezuelan of this last part of the XX century. The homogeneización can have, in some aspects, its negative compensation, because it could annihilate the local and regional cultures and to destroy the diversity originated in the geography. Perhaps if she/he strengthens the local and regional life from the institutional and economic point of view, the tendencies uniformadoras could be compensated and to stimulate a balance between a healthy homogeneización and a vital diversity. Matter anything simple neither anything easy, especially in a country whose political and social characteristics, as well as the origin and the structure of their entrance, they make it depend so much of a central nucleus.
The society and the natural and geographical means
The natural means has gravitated strongly on the political and social processes. The plain is a fundamental actor in the history and in the society of the XIX century, as the coast and the sea they were it in the XVI and XVII centuries. The Andean mountain happened to the first influence of the 2 at the beginning of the XX century. The Orinoco didn't have during many years the influence that would be necessary to expect from a river of its importance; the colonization and the poblamiento were carried out far from the great river. For a scarce population it was enough with the traditional hydraulic resources. A precarious industrial development neither requested great hydroelectric support. But once this resource begins present new perspectives to be they open up and from that moment the hydroelectricity incorporates to a process of new growth, basically located to the south of the Orinoco. Electric power, steel and aluminum, bauxite and uranium, they integrate a complex geoeconómico now and geopolitical dedicated to rebound in the future of the Venezuelan society. To that it is necessary to add him the oil strip of the Orinoco, which represents the great economic and technological event dedicated to be one of the landmarks that will contribute to mark the frontier between the XX century and the XXI one. The natural means offers serious perspectives to Venezuela. For that a group of decisions will be required. The oil strip is an important challenge. There is a quantity of heavy petroleums there; but their exploitation will require considerable ecological cautions. Likewise the one denominated «it conquers of the south», in which she/he will be necessary to make commitments among what is economically profitable, what can be organized as space for populations or establishment of cities and the balance and defense of the nature. New cities for the future, poblamiento of some areas in the frontiers of the southeast and of the south they are, in some cases, true challenges. The weight of the capital and of the center (with the conurbación Valencia-Maracay-Puerto Cabello), it is still very decisive and it can not be said that until today the regional life has charged a definitive impulse. The urban architecture, nevertheless the absence of a predominant style, it has spread to reproduce the forms from Caracas and the cities, without an effective center and you disperse for the growth of residential suburbs or simply marginal population's attaché, they continue growing without bigger controls neither planning. Something in common registers a national characteristic: the urban spaces conceived for the automobiles and in the conception of the roads the engineering of highways prevails. The inhabitant, the citizen, the pedestrian, receive little consideration in the Venezuelan urbanismo. The absence of rational nomenclatures in the urban areas and the movement of lands in green areas contributes to deform the face of the inhabitable space. They are few still the parks in the cities and towns of Venezuela, although starting from 1960 it has been progressed enough in that sense. The old squares conserve little of their rested provincial air of the past. It exists as an automatic impulse toward the uniformity, largely consequence of the centralization and of the psychological weight of the capital. To this sociological fact it is added other also historical: the conservation lack and maintenance. There is as the idea of an eternal beginning, of a begin again, of a to inaugurate permanent. Much has to do this with the abundance of resources that the oil entrance has put in people's hands and of the State; but also to a cultural fact perhaps coming from the old mobility of the aboriginal ones, a great part of which were not sedentary in Venezuela, very different in that to those of other regions of America. The economic crisis of the last years has forced as much to the public sector as to the private one to revalue the concept of the maintenance and the conservation, but it is a process that you grieve it begins. Venezuela is a country sobrepoblado in some areas and deforested in others. The population concentrates on the thorax of the territory and she decreases in other parts of the geographical body. The marginalidad has introduced an imponderable element since sometimes in the cities squatter until places of the center of the populations and not only adjacent surfaces. Much of this marginal sector is constituted by people of neighboring countries, especially of Colombia whose entirety, in the whole territory is not known accurately, but it doesn't seem to be smaller than 1.000.000. The disintegration and the integration were central elements of the national political evolution. Through those 2 processes the Venezuelan sociology is articulated.
The society and the historical order
The most excellent characteristic in the vision that has been had of the country is the capricious division in historical, generally separate periods some of the other ones. Several historians promote their own nomenclature and they not always survive the lines of continuity. The certain fact is that Venezuela counts more than 300 years of colonial life and something less than 200 of republican life. The history usually valorizes more the rupture that the continuity and this usually darkens the vision of some fundamental facts. The sociologist's vision and of the social historian she/he has to proceed with caution for not losing of view the connections or connections of the social life. They are not the indigenous inheritance neither the African those that more weighs in the culture, but the Hispanic ascendancy; but the miscegenation, whichever it is the force of the components, is a patent fact. The town Venezuelan autodescribe proudly their social composition as «coffee with milk». The equitable vocation is an excellent note of the society. So the miscegenation doesn't generate bigger traumas, agregándosele after the Second World War the contribution of the foreign immigration, which has been fundamental part of the progress of the oil era. A fact still to know, with statistical data and anthropological studies, it is the deviation that could mark the mixture with the marginal population's new factors and of the one denominated «culture of the poverty». The historical order represents a lot in the social development, but it is impossible to establish a mechanical identification between methodological divisions of the national history and social behaviors, since these are accustomed to pervivir and to show of same or in a different way in different moments. The history is inherited itself and this sometimes forgets. To imagine that Venezuela begins April 19 1810 would be a dialectical aberration, and to place the whole emphasis in the period of the Independence is equal to amputate 300 years of collective life. The modern Venezuela is basically the time of the petroleum, which has exercised bigger influence that the cane, the indigo one, the cocoa and the tobacco of the colonial era and the republican's coffee. Under Juan Vicente Gómez traditional autoritarismos and Marcos Pérez Jiménez, as well as in the opening to the political freedoms of Eleazar López Contreras and Isaías Medina Angarita and in the period of democratic stabilization of the last century third, the petroleum has been present. It is more: she/he is par excellence the actor in the historical scenario. The social evolution is continuous, it is broken in some features and it is affirmed in other, but it flows inside the historical current. Not few of the current behaviors of the Venezuelan have their roots in the colonial time and until the basic fact that the State is the direct beneficiary of the oil entrance it is consequence of the Spanish regalismo.
The society and the political order
The political order is inevitably bound to the society. Separated from the Spanish empire, which was, before everything, an order, the elements estamentales, the breeds and segments, organized under the atmosphere jerarquizador of the colonial system, influenced by the notions of the pro-slavery economy and inspired by the essential starting point that the classes were unequal before the right, a collapse takes place. The forms and structures of the production during more than 300 years they created the bases of an agricultural society that it was supplied itself and she/he benefitted of the export; and the conflict to obtain bigger benefits and more free of this it determined in great measure the behavior of the directing class in the crucial moment in that she/he enters in crisis the power of the empire like consequence of the invasion napoleónica. That directing structure, owner of the symbol of the social but lacking importance of being able to political, for their education, for their relative refinement, era a favorable atmosphere so that they fastened in her the fires of the dissent fed by the independence of United States and for the French Revolution. The vitality and the Venezuelan soldiers' mobility during the War of Independence are effect of the agricultural society. The llanero becomes soldier because the horse and the meat provide him a capacity of incomparable movement in that moment. The political system of the first stage of the restored Republic of Venezuela (1830-1858) it is the one that better it represents a period of transition between the Colony and the Republic, between the formal and declared war and the war more or less permanent that covers with the names of civil war and caudillesca, which was not more than the representation of the dispersion of the power. When the power is able to be centered in a dominant commander, either Páez or Monagas and later Antonio White Guzmán or Frizzy Joaquín, are peace and serenity. The Latin American caudillismo is the product of the division of the rights of the State, of its weakness, of its poverty. When the power returns at the hands of an unique boss, as Cipriano Castro or Juan Vicente Gómez, it has peace again, to expense of important civic freedoms; and in the case of Gómez another reality is not configured less decisive: the petroleum. The system political gomecista becomes hard and it is affirmed because the State begins to receive, from 1914, the benefits of the new entrance. The revenue that was a fragile cartoon until that moment, begins to feed. The mechanisms of the international economy appear in the scene. The country is inserted inside systems of power and of influence that they overflow its frontiers. The local, traditionalist society, user of ancestral technologies, with an essentially handmade and mercantile urban economy, is linked with the international economic community and with technologies and systems of organization extranacionales. It won't be enough, from that moment, with which the political power is affirmed on its domestic bases but rather it will also require a strange genuineness, not strictly based on values but in concrete benefits that are exported. The petroleum has had an effect stabilizer. Their revenues have been good to calm down and until filling certain social pressures, and sometimes, to anesthetize impatiences. She/he affirmed to the gomecismo and the authoritarian political system and their reach stabilizer benefitted to the democracy, predominantly in the last 30 years, after having not given little oxygen to the governments of transition postgomecistas (1935-1945), broadly positive liberal rehearsals. The entrance allows a relative distribution, unequal and until capricious, but finally distribution. That gives floor to the political power. Only from 1973, with the violent increase of the revenues, the effect equilibrador becomes an increase of the expectations which has weakened, for the indebtedness, the inflation, the unemployment and the sobredimensión of plans and projects, the growing stability that the Nation was acquiring from 1914. The political system, nevertheless the profile differences between the authoritarian forms and the liberal and democratic, it has conserved surprising lines of continuity. The fact that the petroleum is the distributor of the entrance it has nurtured the conception of the capitalism of State that is today a concrete and expensive reality, which has not contributed little to the current indebtedness. The State has been in the center of the system and that it is the most notorious feature in the current society.
The man, the resources and the social structure
The Venezuelan population in 1979-1980 grew to a rate of 3,1%. 42% is smaller than 15 years of age; 54% is bigger than 20 and 3% is only bigger than 65 years. It is considered that the population's 82% is alfabeta and only 18 illiterate%. The density for 1971 belonged to 11,9 inhabitants for km2. The habits, the ways of living off the Venezuelan have changed substantially after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The decline of the agriculture has influenced in the feeding. 3% of the territory is used for agriculture; 20% for cattle raising. Around people's 76% she/he lives in populations of more than 100.000 inhabitants. The urbanization also influences in the habits and in the consumption patterns. The uses and nutritious habits continue very closely to the social changes. The meat, the milk, vegetables and fruits waste away more in the high strata. In the most modest, the eggs, the leguminous ones, the corn and the pasta. The wheat contributes 17,5% of the caloric flow and 23% of the proteins. The cereals, cared in more than 70%, they contribute more than 40% of the calories and of the proteins of the human diet. The animal feeding also depends on the sorghum import and soya. The nature of the consumption makes even more vulnerable the diet of the Venezuelan. The nutritional problem varies of region in region. While the nutritious deficiencies suffer the children smaller than 5 years in Portuguese in 26%, 10% is only affected by the same situation in Lara. But it is not only the rural population's reduction and the increase of the urban one but also the modification in the volume of the social classes. The classes I and II (high and half discharge, respectively), they passed of 1% in 1930 to 20%, 50 years later. This has importance in several senses. To interpret the nutritious question it is necessary to examine the social structure. According to FUNDACREDESA 20% of the Venezuelans belongs to the classes I, II and III(media), the class IV (proletarian) it is conformed by 42% and the V (marginal) for 38%. The nutritious deficiencies influence in several differences and aptitudes that are not genetic, ethnic and racial but social. The children of the class V matures more slowly and one of 5 years uses 40% less words that one of the class I, II and III. Other facts impress in connection with the feeding. In Carabobo, Portuguese and Yaracuy, very near regions, it was found that the consumption of proteins was the appropriate one but that of calories was 24% less than the minimum requirement. The social structure influences on all the aspects of the behavior. The most favored classes (high, half discharge and she/he mediates) they are more voluminous in Caracas than in the interior and the proletarian and marginal, they are more significant in the county. The social inequality, the poverty and the marginalidad are reflected in the weight when being born and the boy's measures, data to which are attributed importance in the carried out studies. It should be considered, however that is very difficult to speak of social classes in Latin America, because there is not a true and extensive proletariat; on the other hand the informal and marginal sector constantly ascends. On the other hand, the urban productive forces have been unskillful to absorb the work force. The national politicians rewarded more to the urban population than to the rural one and this it is partly the reason for which the cities were congested and they become explosive and superpobladas. The term «proletariat» it is more conventional than real because frequently it is included in that denomination non productive activities, not stable and rather handmade or occasional characteristic of the informal sector. The proletariat, in strict sense, it must be bound to the industrialization.
Among the lines of continuity and of rupture they are diverse characteristics of the Venezuelan town, some of which are ancestral and they come from the bottom of the history and other they have incorporated to the collective sensibility as consequence of diverse events. In the XX century the most excellent of all has been the petroleum, in the aspect here considered as in several others. One of those characteristics is the paper of the magic and the chance. It is not possible to understand the society without stopping in this crucial point. People wait whenever something good you/he/she can twist the direction of the life. The hand of God extended generously on the underground and it put the petroleum. Humboldt and the European naturalists come to America admired the nature and they found it prodigal. People had the intuition that was not necessary to make a lot in front of this atmosphere. The indigenous cosmogonies used to have a magic bottom. The Christianity brought a doctrine of the further on, of a supreme instance and of a metaphysical and momentous plane. The Africans contributed another magic and superstitious force. The fact is that the mestizo gathered everything and the result is a very extended belief in the good one and in the bad luck, a credulity sometimes exaggerated in the miracle and the good fortune with its rising dramatic reverses: the curse, the eye wrong, the witchcraft, the mabita, the pava and other popular forms of expressing the telluric perplexity. The magic, blended with the Christianity, it has produced devotions, beliefs and superstitions. The party idea, associated to the saints, translates intimate collective feelings. The employer party is a mixture of the miracle and the enjoyment, of the superstition, the magic and the faith. Extraordinary cultural combination able to produce devotions and surprising adhesions multitudinarias. The man that waits thinks that an indirect, oblique, mysterious art, it can bring closer it to the good fortune. This wait is in definitive hope. Of there that the witchcraft, as craft of the magic, of the miracle and the luck, have gathered so many elements around to its. The oldest notions on the destination, on the reading of the hand or of the letters combined with powders and essences that are good to reject or to attract, to defend or to persuade. The horse careers gather this whole magic flow. It is trusted in that of one day for other the wealth can favor us. The bet and the game of 5 6 constitute very representative symbols of the lifestyle and of the national feeling. Their continuous operation can serve as reference to study the collective reactions. The belief in the luck is not an incentive for the economic development. Fortunately this magic feeling and lúdico have come to be partially compensated by the affluence inmigratoria, which arrived at considerable levels after 1945. The Spaniards, Italian and Portuguese, as well as the nuclei that moved from the center of Europe, brought their methodical habits, their trust in the work, their activity and experience and they contributed an effort without which has not been possible to undertake the modernization that today knows. In the urban constructions, in the agricultural plans, as Turén, in the distribution of foods, in the small restaurants of the highways and big or small cities, the immigrant's print has left its cultural rake. The productivity in the work and the sense of the saving, they are also active fundamental of the European immigrant. Regrettably that immigration stopped being adduced that it subtracted work to the Creoles and that it was inconciliable with the discharge rate of the population's growth. Years later the European contribution was substituted by the anarchical Spanish American secret immigration whose exact figures are difficult to know.
Do I populate cheerful or sad town?
The reactions of the Venezuelan before the destination give cause to formulate us this question: is a sad or cheerful town? The happiness, says the Dictionary of the Real Spanish Academy, it is manifested by external signs. It is a pleasing one and I live movement of the spirit, sometimes without certain cause. There are words, expressions or acts with which one manifests the joy. Of the other side, the sadness is regret, melancholy. The sad thing can be painful, troublesome, difficult to support. José Antonio Páez said: «...téngase very in bill that they are not Venezuelan people that regret bad in silence; before, they sin and they have always sinned to try to cure them with heroic remedies, to the first pain attempt...» The question is more important of that than it seems and its analysis can have reaches sociological and political and great practical significance when it is applied to the work, to the productivity and the social solidarity. It is necessary to approach the topic with caution, because it is not easy to extract conclusions and evidences. It is very different the attitude of the spirit in the high and rich classes that in the less favored ones. The statements, the expressions of the Venezuelan would make think that there is a bias to the sadness. There are fatalistic expressions and other catastrophists and apocalyptic. An inclination to imagine that some situations are hopeless. In the music and in the painting she/he is sometimes reflected the social situation of the country and the lack of political stability of the past. It usually has something melancholic in the music of some regions and in the topics of the popular songs. Was the colonial art impregnated of the Spanish values, but, didn't she/he also have its sadness? In a given moment the heroism and the machismo, product of the values and references imposed by the civil wars, they interfere the tendencies of the national soul. In arid areas or lashed by the hunger and the tropical illnesses it is not easy to feed an optimism. The civil wars also left their print when valorizing certain destructive feelings. They become patent topics as the absent or dead mother, the disillusioned woman, the distant girlfriend, the distant homeland. The traditional urban gathering used to acquire the form of the slander with an end denigrante and until destructive. It was social violence translated in verbal, expressed or hidden violence. Then, an essential fact: the idea of the death, the rites of the farewell and the sense of the good-bye. The vocation for the work is a cheerful attitude of the spirit. How has it been reacted before the crisis or economic joints? Yesterday it was said: «it will dawn and we will see» or «God misses nobody». The «God will provide» she/he is the ancestral position of beings slaves, sick persons or poor that don't trust the will and in the effort. Any futurology exercise will have to join the happiness for the work, which comes largely from the nutrition, of the education and of the motivation, with the desire of making, anything of that which is tradition in the Latin American countries.
The aptitudes
Of all this she/he comes off the great query on the aptitudes. In the first place, it seems the capacity to be quite undoubtedly it is a social and not genetic fact, since the feeding and the stimuli influence in the ability and the dexterity of a collective for certain chores. It is equally notorious that the investment in health and teaching improves the yields. What the has been called «slack» Creole, the ineptitude or the reluctance of the Venezuelan for the work, she/he can look now at himself as something much more complex. It has been said that it comes from the injustice, of the feeding and of the exploitation. The national literature is abundant in allusions to the «chinchorro» and the «it rocks» as symbols of the lazy or indolent posture. Others speak of the climate. Few times a primordial element is mentioned: the physiology of the work in torrid climates, which can be guided to obtain the biggest yield in the most favorable hours and with the appropriate feeding. It is important to consider inside this aspect the profile motivacional. In the underdeveloped countries, sociologist Talcott Parsons says, it is worth more the being that making and the economic relationship is not specific but diffuse. The motivation for the achievement, as professor Mac Clelland formulates it, it is weak, so much more all that has been identified that the strongest motivation is the vocation of power. Since the economic development is also the consequence of a collective spirit, it is I specify then to point out that the good degrees are not obtained without the corresponding motivation. The indolence has existed as feature of the society and it has not been sole right of the lowest stratifications in the social body. A more integrated society will also be a more motivated society. The transculturación obtained through the Oil industry, which used in the moment of their installation very advanced technologies for the level of national development, has demonstrated that with an appropriate management, with an efficient organization, the Venezuelan town develops aptitudes that make it skilled for complex tasks of coordination and of execution. Example of that has been the work and the fruit obtained in the refineries and in the oil fields. The efficiency of the sector came originally from the management and technology foreigners with the Venezuelan manpower that which allows to postulate that the yields can lose temper of agreement with the profiles motivacionales.
Ethics and society
The War of Independence demoralized the population's great part. With everything, concluded the war certain traditional values of the Hispanic morals, mixture of chivalry, nobility and rightness survived. But the violence was very hard and practically the country lived in her during 100 years (1810-1908). Domingo of Monteverde and José Tomás Boves didn't only annihilate to the First one and the Second Republic but rather they affected the bases of the collective morals. The directing class was destroyed and 30 years later the Federal War came, which caused the east fire until occident in its first year and also the valleys of the Tuy. There was not span of earth that survived, Laureano Villanueva she/he says in their Life of Zamora. More than 100.000 deads they were spread in the theater of the war and more than 3.000 people they went to the jail. From the beginning of the Independence, the uncertainty and the insecurity they appropriated of the Venezuelan town. It is very difficult to build under these conditions a national ethics. To the social and anarchical violence it is necessary to add the one that was applied from the power. The social behavior takes root in these rivalries. The private morals could survive numerous times, in different parts of the country, partly for the Christian influence. But the public dishonesty was a frequent fact and until scandalous in the XIX century because there was not a net separation between the public interest and the private one. The poor country also lived off its picaresque one, as they reveal it the anecdotes and episodes of Francisco García it Toasts in Memoirs of a vividor. Then, the corruption strengthens with the petroleum when they already intervene also international factors and a layer of abundance is formed around the State. Later on the consumption expectations appear, the habits, the new behavior ways that influence in the moral quality of the behavior. Through their social and political evolution, Venezuela offered big samples and examples of stability in the behavior and in the moral attitude. The symbols and points of reference of the nation were always nevertheless these that such values were sometimes hidden by those reiterated offensives of the violence or of the immorality and the corruption, which could grow with the abundance because the prosperity was not preceded or accompanied by solid ethical backs.
The man and the things
The most representative symbol in the Venezuela of the XX century has been the automobile. It is a manifestation of the status, of the importance, of the hierarchy, of the power, of the influence and of the personal attractiveness. It replaced to the horse like sign of «machismo» and of social persuasion. The automobile appropriated of the imagination and it has been made serve in all the forms. People are sacrificed to acquire it and the urban infrastructures and viales make comfortable to the increase of the self-driven traffic. The cheap gasoline subsidized the automobile initially inside of and outside of the national market. The streets and the cities make comfortable for the traffic of vehicles. The old sidewalks are clipped and she/he takes off space to the pedestrian, to the pedestrian, to the citizen to be offered it to the new conqueror. The motor vehicle has influenced in the national life more than any other instrument and she/he is main character of an entire culture. She/he has offered mobility, but it has hindered the transport. Being founded in the circumstance of being oil country a doctrine of supposed mining economy was developed according to which railroads should not be built because here it was cheaper the self-driven transport. But passengers and it loads, from the point of view of the transport, has been taken and brought in a more efficient and cheaper way for the railroad. The culture of the automobile is individualistic, competitive, exhibicionista, consumista and despilfarradora. As there has been money in abundance the most sophisticated models they were acquired, which it substituted them to him for other new and more advanced when demanding maintenance. The repercussion of this fact on other areas of the behavior has incalculable effects. The maintenance was not popular concept in a society that she/he got used to substitute the things without extracting of them the rational maximum of duration and service. The coexistence with the things offers a fundamental challenge now to a nation with smaller abundance. The man's coexistence with the things, with the mechanical facts, with the communications, they have had fundamental influence in the life of the modern Venezuela. It has increased the information and the mobility. The «weekend», the «second house» or residence for vacations sometimes represented in groups of apartments in beaches and mountains, the most frequent contact between the interior and the capital, the use of the airplane, they show, at first sight, a new way of living very not very similar to the slow one to happen of the traditional society. In 1978, culminating year, 103.467 automobiles took place, 52.079 trucks, 22.802 jeeps and 3.146 tractors with a local component of 50%. That industry had a capacity of 20.000 people's employment. At the end of 1979 there were 61.800 km of terrestrial roads, 22.600 km of them of first class and 14.500 km earth roads. The same year there were 2.520.000 of vehicles against 1.590.000 in 1975. In comparison, 212 km of railroads of the State and 197 km of the iron companies only existed. In 1978 they traveled for railroad 364.000 passengers and 163 t of load. On the other hand, for air, in 1978 7.902.000 passengers traveled against 737.000 in 1970. There are ports to receive and to mobilize 8.800.000 t of load in 1978 against 4.500.000 in 1973. In 1978 there were ships with a tonnage of 232.000. In 1979 there were 1.075.042 local phone lines. It is calculated that for that date 77 telephones existed for each 1.000 inhabitants. In the year in reference, 51 daily newspapers circulated with a total tiraje of 2.042.000 copies. 950.000 entrances were sold to the cinema. In 1976, there were 1.431.000 televisions and 5.000.000 of radiorreceptores. The man's relationship with the mechanical facts has not been good. The abandoned tractors or without appropriate maintenance, the same as the machineries of public works, the vehicles of the State and also the matters, the public transportation, they teach clearly that there is not harmony between the social behavior and the minimum demands of the technical civilization. The public goods don't deserve consideration of the society and such an attitude is reflected in its deterioration. An exceptional case, indicator that that attitude can be modified, it is that of the Meter of Caracas, of which you/they have put on in service 3 lines and you continues its construction; this urban transport works with a high level of efficiency and it is also notable the discipline level and of the users' conservation in general. The modernization process is inevitably contradictory. A society that the tools that it uses, doesn't take place is limited in the understanding of its nature and of their ends. The industrialized countries invented or they manufactured themselves their mechanical devices. This circumstance believes a relationship different to those of a nation that it cares those products without acquiring the culture that she/he conceived them simultaneously. From the sociological point of view the technology presents serious adjustment difficulties in the countries in development, so much more all that the urbanization processes are not of the industrialization but of the simple emigration from the field for the inadequacy of the agriculture to offer employment and possibilities.
Computer science and society
This context becomes more complex with the computer science irruption. How to manage it in a generally inefficient society? Venezuela jumps to the computers without having reached a regular operation in services like the mail. Due to the satellites it is easier to communicate with Hong Kong that between the capital and near places to her. The absence of maintenance of the traditional machines shows a social attitude that is not compatible with the flowing normality that the computer science requires. The computer will introduce a very rigorous level of demands and it is possible that the transculturación that generates also contributes to readjust certain collective habits. The computer science could not face the organization demands magically and of efficiency. It is in definitive the man like such, the only one that can carry out that transformation. But it doesn't fit doubt that the computer science, the resources of the space, the communications and the international transmission of the image are powerful elements that will have concrete influence in the social evolution.
Energy and society
During the XIX century the Venezuelan society a sharp conflict lived between the economic liberalism and the agricultural society. The law of April 10 1834 about the freedom of the contracts put of relief the contradictions among the interests of the urban mercantile economy and the agricultural society, base of sustentation of the national wealth. The coffee was the main fruit of export of the Republic, as the cocoa it had been it of the Colony. After the Independence it breaks up the economic bond with Spain and the small recently initiate nation has to make comfortable, in a more vulnerable position, to the demands of the international economy. The implacable rule of the international division of the work begins to have its effects and the imports exercise its influence in the modification of the consumption habits. But the culminating fact, dedicated to more social repercussions, was the petroleum, the one which from 1914, it begins to be present. Later the use of the energy in growing form and until excessive, for the first floor price of the gasoline and the disproportionate purchase of automobiles, she/he has also had a fundamental effect. As for the energy, Rafael Alfonzo Ravard, former president of Petroleums of expressed Venezuela: «During these twenty-five years, between 1920 and 1945, the statistics on energy use are scarce and almost nonexistent. However, we can affirm that the use of the energy in Venezuela was among the lowest in Latin America, even counting the one that was used in the oil industry. The country had the whole energy that has wanted to use to the lowest prices in the world, but seemingly it could not take out him profit to these advantages». there was, because, an era oil non energetics. The figures corresponding to 1945, mentioned in the previous text reveal as the total consumption of energy it reached the figure of 970.000 t of equivalent petroleum (18.600 b/d), of those which, more than the half it consumed it the own oil industry. Of the rest, approximately 45% was gasoline for transport, 26% wasted away in the industry manufacturer, 19% in the trade and the homes and finally 10% to generate electricity. All this represented a consumption of 223,5 kw for inhabitant. In comparison, the production of petroleum reached the figure of 46.200.000 t, what is equal to 886.000 b/d, that is to say, 50 times the internal consumption. The difference was exported. The capacity of refinement of the oil industry hardly arrived to 42.000 b/d. The net of pipelines reached a longitude of 1.613 km and 92 km that of gasoducto, fundamentally used in the own oil industry. The electricity and the gas are relatively new elements in the Venezuelan society. The electrification and the use of any other energy type, coming of the water, of the coal or geothermal, they favor the decentralization because they allow to extend the industrialization territorially. For the presence of their other energy resources it has not put Venezuela enough attention in the nuclear energy. The use of the energy outlines, on the other hand, numerous problems regarding the environment. A behavior in front of the nature will be obvious consequence of the type of social behavior, of the lifestyle. Without forgetting that not all human development must base exclusively on increasing the energy consumption, since local, handmade technologies can be applied that take advantage of knowledge accumulated by the tradition, to give place to an autochthonous production able to be made it presents. The prestige of the chimneys is associated to the classic ideas of the economic growth. But the harmony of the society and a reasonable average of happiness and collective realization also supposes the use of other resources.
The new dimension
The economic and social dimensions of the country have changed. The fiscal revenues that in 1925 they arrived to Bs. 120.000.000 ascended in 1930 at 255.000.000, in 1940 at 329.000.000 and in 1945 to Bs. 660.000.000. the exports were growing of Bs. 276.000.000 in 1925, 743.000.000 in 1930, at 887.000.000 in 1940 and to Bs. 1.120.000.000 in 1945. The country of the beginning of the oil era had 2.500.000 h and that of 1980 around 15.000.000. The economic peacefulness brought by the exploitation of the hydrocarbons has produced a constant increment of the annual budgets of the public sector, so much in the Central Administration as in the more and more important decentralized Public Administration (industries of the State, regional corporations, autonomous institutes, etc.) This fact has supposed an ascent of the expectations of the diverse sectors of the Venezuelan society, because in a situation of abundance it is expected and it is requested more, at the same time that she/he increases the temptation of the populist demagoguery in the political field. The situation that made crisis at the beginning of 1983 has come to collide with this process of growing expectations. At the moment, Venezuela still has numerous human resources, economic and financiers to face the current challenges, but the adjustment of those expectations with the reality are work of the future.