As the journalist Richard Gott recently said, "[Chavez] never stops talking and he never stops working." He is also eminently quotable as demonstrated by the passages below:CULTURE:It can be said to the first world, above all the so-called "developed" world, that the problem of poverty is not only that of Latin America, it is a problem of the whole planet, it is also a problem of the developed world. There are more dangerous poverties than the material type, there is moral poverty, spiritual poverty, the poverty of principles, we could say that material poverty is the consequence of moral poverty.
Without a cultural process, there cannot be a revolution. A revolution that is not accompanied by a cultural impulse designed to empower our roots, propels ideas, rescues costumes... a revolution that does not include that is not a revolution.
EDUCATION:Some people say, hey Chavez, why are we spending so much on adult literacy and not on physical infrastructure. My answer is that before buildings and highways, we have to build a sovereign people who can live with dignity.
These plotters, these unpatriotic people, they don't want the people to be educated; they want the children and young people, especially those from the poorest sections of society and from the middle classes, to be ignorant, not to have access to education, so that they can dominate them for another 500 years. I promise you they won't succeed! I call on all the people of Venezuela to rise up united, to defend education, which is the lifeblood of the Republic!
Reading has always been a constant in my life. Through culture, study, we began to see the truth. Study and above all reading freed us from darkness. This is the thesis of Pablo Freire: "The importance of the act of reading", it is an act of self-improvement. Yes, you obtain the edge of the freeing sword through reading.
MEDIA:In the South we are victims of the media monopoly of the North, which acts as a power system responsible for disseminating in our countries and planting in the minds of our citizens, information, values and consumption patterns that are basically alien to our realities and that have turned themselves into the most powerful and effective tool of domination. Never is domination more perfect than when the dominated people think like the dominators do.
SOCIALISM:We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything. That’s the debate we must promote around the world, and the WSF is a good place to do it.
SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM:So, Karl Marx could reflect, think and write looking towards a distant future. The same could be said of Rosa Luxemburg, but for us it can't. The circumstances have changed terribly. We don't have centuries in front of us. It could be decades at most that are left for the peoples of this planet to make a decision. Either we really change the social and economic order, we say now we must have a new, renovated socialism of the 21st century, or we decide that life finishes on this planet.
This reflection is something I feel deep in my heart because of my profound conviction that the planet is being degraded more and more everyday, and that life on this planet is under threat. Because of this, today more that ever the dilemma has return with much more force, socialism or barbarism.
THE STRUGGLE:I am at your service to help in whatever way I can in this direction. All of Venezuela is at your service to continue the process every day, without rest, this process of discussion, ideas, proposals, struggle and of battle, and so as to not only see each other at festivals every four years or every time there is a meeting of the G8 in some place where some groups go to protest. That is not enough! We need to be at it every day and every night. Either we save the world or we allow the world to be destroyed.
THE US:The future of the world depends on the consciousness of the American people. When they unite, they can save the world from war and destruction.
I sincerely hope that some day the US public will develop some kind of mass critical consciousness, that they will remove the veil from their eyes and see the media powers for what they are. No part of the human community can live entirely on its own planet, with its own laws of motion and cut off from the rest of humanity. They must be critical, and make it their personal responsibility to humanity and morality to discover the truth.
