In the last few pages of the book Hacia la democracia: contribución al estudio de la historia económica-político-social de Venezuela (Mexico City, 1939), the Venezuelan historian and diplomat Carlos Irazábal acknowledges his country’s transition toward a democratic government that reflects the growing political awareness of the working class. The basic goals of this awareness—that encouraged the protection of the country’s natural resources, especially its oil—were to do away with caudillismo [the cult of the caudillo] and despotism following the death of General Juan Vicente Gómez, who governed Venezuela with an iron fist on several occasions between 1908 and 1935. A note inserted in the third edition of the book (1974) confirms that that movement, in the wake of the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, had contributed to Venezuela’s transition to a middle-class democracy based on “free electoral processes”.   

Carlos Irazábal (1907–91) was a member of the Generation of ‘28 that opposed the despotic, effete regime of General Juan Vicente Gómez. Irazábal’s book Hacia la democracia: contribución al estudio de la historia económico-político-social de Venezuela (published in 1939 during his exile in Mexico) was the first Marxist analysis of the process. By that time, the López Contreras regime (1935–41) was steadily distancing itself from the Gómez period, and paying attention to social and political demands to allow Venezuelan society to experiment with democratic liberties. Despite the fact that he was expelled from the country for being a communist, Irazábal acknowledges that the government has promoted education and permitted the founding of unions, political parties, and a free press. The new batch of left wing intellectuals—Mariano Picón Salas, Inocente Palacios, Miguel Otero Silva, Miguel Acosta Saignes, and Gilberto Antolínez—endorsed the regime’s cultural reforms and, in particular, its moves on behalf of art education. The author’s enthusiastic response to what was happening in his country is perhaps best reflected in the visual arts, which were at that time more open to Americanist influences. With a war in Europe, it made sense to go to Mexico to further one’s studies; this was the course chosen by Héctor Poleo and César Rengifo, the first representatives of social and indigenist realism.     

Carlos Irazábal discusses what is happening in Mexico under the socialist government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), and in the United States during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reforms to the capitalist system. In addition to the summary of Irazábal’s work reviewed here, the note inserted in the 1974 edition shows that a Marxist writer could recognize the positive side of the establishment of a middle-class democracy in Venezuela.