The Dialectics of Dependency and the Insurrection of Praxis in Venezuela’s Republican History

 

By Kelly Josefina Pottella Guevara

The republican evolution of Venezuela constitutes, within the arena of global critical thought, a paradigmatic case of the tension between the "Enclave-State" and the collective will toward national emancipation. What the world observes today in Venezuela is not a localized crisis of administrative governance, but rather the climatic phase of a "structure of anti-development" that has been meticulously perfected for over a century. For intellectuals and theorists of political economy, the Venezuelan experience offers a universal warning: modernity financed by extractive rent—devoid of genuine cognitive and technical sovereignty, is merely a sophisticated iteration of neocolonial subordination.

Since the consolidation of the petroleum state, Venezuela was projected as a tributary periphery. Throughout the 20th century, particularly during the 1970s, the country lived through the mirage of an industrialization that, in rigorous terms, operated as a mechanism of national decapitalization. The systemic adoption of industrial complexes under the "turnkey" (llave en mano) modality, coupled with the shielding of foreign intellectual property regimes, were not vehicles of progress but instruments of knowledge expropriation. By acquiring entire infrastructures without effective knowledge-transfer protocols, a "hollow ownership" was institutionalized: the nation possessed the machine, yet the technical algorithm and the capacity for innovation remained anchored in the centers of hegemony. This juridical architecture ensured that national wealth circulated back to the metropolises through the perpetual payment of patents and specialized services, reducing the national creative genius to a subsidiary function.

This economic distortion translated into a territorial and existential tragedy. The "port economy" devoured food sovereignty and desolated the countryside, replacing the productive memory of the land with the logic of consuming imported luxury goods. The nation was thus left disarmed against the fluctuations of the international financial market—a vulnerability that was instrumentalized in milestones such as "Black Friday" in 1983. Then, as now, the crisis was not treated as a structural problem, but as a mechanism for social disciplining. A narrative of the "intrinsic inefficiency" of the national subject was installed to justify neoliberal adjustments and the massive transfer of public assets to transnational capital, transforming external debt into the primary instrument of political blackmail.

The historical inflection point of the last few decades represents a profound attempt at an ontological rupture with this grammar of the enclave. By attempting to territorialize politics through grassroots self-governance and communes, Venezuela sought to shift the nation’s center of gravity: from the corporate office to the productive territory. The current geopolitical siege, which includes the hijacking of institutions and financial asphyxiation, is the global order's response to a nation that has decided its greatest wealth does not reside in the subsoil, but in the sovereign capacity to produce its own knowledge.

The lesson Venezuela delivers to humanity is that sovereignty in the 21st century is, above all, a matter of cognitive independence. If a nation allows its technique, its science, and its memory to be hijacked by the creditors of "single-thought" (pensamiento único), its freedom will always remain a juridical formality devoid of real content. Facing the attempt to liquidate the political through force and induced scarcity, there emerges the necessity for a new ethic of development: one that understands that only a definitive break with the architecture of divestment will allow the peoples of the periphery to cease being debtors of their own destiny.