Ballad of the Silent Man: Reflections on Venezuela in the Context of Latin America Fuat Ercan This paper is an analysis of the recent developments in Venezuela based on a combination of the author’s direct observations with a historical approach to the political economy of Latin America. The paper discusses the broader pattern of Latin American capitalist development and Venezuela’s specificities within this pattern, in an attempt to understand the factors that led to the Bolivarian Revolution. In doing this, the author criticizes the Dependency School’s emphasis on the role of external factors in the development of capitalism in Latin America, and instead suggests an alternative periodization based on the conceptual separation between “surplus transfer” and “surplus creation”. He argues that there were four main stages in Latin American capitalist development: i) colonial mercantilist stage (marked by surplus transfer), ii) simple export-based accumulation (still marked by surplus transfer, but requiring money and commercial capital for the formation of the interior bourgeoisie), iii) accumulation based on productive capital (marked by surplus creation and formation of the interior bourgeoisie), iv) internationalization of the total circuit of capital (marked by enhanced surplus creation and internationalization of the interior bourgeoise). It is argued that the latest stage of capitalist development accelerated the process of proleterianization and led to the creation of an enormous section of urban poor all over the continent. It is this internal dynamics, rather than the external factors emphasized by Dependency School theorists, that has led to the recent resurgence of the Latin American left in general, and Venezuelan left in particular. In this sense, the particularities of Venezuela’s pattern of accumulation based on petroleum extraction does not make it a totally exceptional case. To the contrary, Venezuela is going through the same process of enhanced surplus creation and intensified class conflicts that dominate all Latin American countries. Thus, if this transition process happens to fail, certain elements of Chávez’s “endogeneous development” strategy such as the support for small enterprises and private property in land, might lead to a further deepening of capitalist relations in Venezuela. What is still inspiring in this contradictory process, however, is the ongoing shift of Chavez’s discourse from populism to socialism since he came to power.