ABSTRACT
After two and a half decades of the policies based on a neoliberal model of economic development, Latin America is a very different place from what it was in the 1970s and what it was becoming. The major element of the social structure in Latin American societies is the relationship of capital to labor. Members of the capitalist class are easy enough to identify by the size of their capital and by functional criteria, as well as by the perquisites of their position, such as wealth and power. This chapter provides a graphical representation of the class structure of LatinAmerican society and of the position of workers and producers in the popular sector of this structure. Those are the capitalist class, the middle class and the working class. In the postwar period, a large part of the rural population was pushed into the towns and cities, converted into an urban proletariat.
