In the midst of the highest inflation in seven years, on May 7 Venezuela’s revolutionary working people’s government escalated a campaign against price and currency speculators. President Hugo Chavez declared that his government would create an “export-import corporation to take over middle-class management of the people’s resources”.

On April 13, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stood before hundreds of thousands of supporters on Bolivar Avenue in Caracas and declared that this date would be commemorated each year as the “Day of the Bolivarian National Militia, the People in Arms and the April Revolution”.

On March 11 a Reuters article headlined “Venezuela Murder-rate Quadrupled Under Chavez: NGO” was carried by major corporate media outfits including Yahoo!7 News, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Before representatives of the grassroots communal councils from across Venezuela assembled in Ezequiel Zamora Park in the capital Caracas, President Hugo Chavez enacted the Organic Law on the Federal Government Council on February 20, which he said will “further open the door to advancing in the distribution of power in the hands of the people, and to achieving a more efficient and

“How much longer are we going to allow transnational companies to come here to speculate with our prices?” asked Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on January 17, announcing the expropriation of the large Exitos department store chain–three-quarters owned by the French company Casino Guichard Perrachon, with a minority share owned by the Colombian company Exito SA – on his weekly TV

“Don’t make the mistake, President Obama, of ordering an overt aggression against Venezuela utilising Colombia … We are ready for anything, and Venezuela will never, never be a Yankee colony again”, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stated on November 8, in the wake of the Obama administration’s signing on October 30 of a 10-year accord with Colombia for a joint military build-up.

“We do not want war, we hate it. But we must prepare for it”, explained Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez on August 16 in response to plans to increase numbers of US bases around his country, which has confirmed the continuation of US threats of aggression from the Bush to the Obama administrations.

Members of the Venezuelan parliament passed the Organic Education Law on August 14.

The revolutionary socialist government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on July 9 proposed a reform to democratise the media and stop the corporate media endlessly campaigning to violently overthrow the elected government.

Some revolutionary socialists remain convinced that no revolution has taken place and that the government of President Hugo Chavez is substituting ‘socialism from above’ in place of grassroots working-class struggle.

“A top Venezuelan opposition leader is seeking political asylum in Peru … after fleeing his country to avoid what he calls a politically motivated witch hunt directed by the government of President Hugo Chavez”, the April 22 Washington Post reported.

While US President Barack Obama is desperately trying to rescue the crisis-ridden capitalist system with multi-billion dollar bailouts for the financial corporations, tent cities of newly homeless people are springing up across the US as unemployment and housing foreclosures soar.

On February 15 some 6.3 million Venezuelans, 54.86% of voters, approved a constitutional amendment that allows all public officials to be re-elected more than once, thus enabling Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez to stand in the next presidential election in 2012.

Commenting on the February 15 referendum in Venezuela to decide on amending article 230 of the country’s constitution to abolish the restriction that elected officials serve two terms, the editorial in the December 19 Washington Post claimed Venezuela’s revolutionary socialist president Hugo Chavez is an “authoritarian” who will use “force or fraud” to win the referendum bec

Despite Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez leading a popular socialist revolution in his country that has inspired millions beyond its borders, a range of people describing themselves as revolutionary socialists don’t accept that such a revolution is taking place and have declared Chavez incapable of leading such a revolution; that he is an obstacle to carrying through such a revolut

On September 17, former Venezuelan vice-president Jose Vicente reported to the country’s National Assembly that the US government was at the centre of a foiled coup plot planned for October 15 to violently overthrow the elected government of President Hugo Chavez that is leading a socialist revolution in Venezuela.

“I naively took as a reference point Tony Blair’s proposal for a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism – capitalism with a human face”, Hugo Chavez, told Time magazine in 2006, reflecting on his own views before he was elected Venezuela’s president in 1998. Since then, Chavez’s views have dramatically changed.

Arriving in Havana on June 16 for a meeting with Cuban President Raul Castro and his brother, retired Cuban president Fidel Castro, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that Cuba and Venezuela were undergoing “one and the same revolution”.

On July 1 the US Fourth Fleet, operating in the Caribbean and off the coast of South America, was been re-activated in a desperate attempt by the US rulers to reassert control over a region in which working people in rebellion against US corporate domination.

A centralised planned economy to meet the needs of the people, essential for a socialist revolution, is taking shape in Venezuela. It began when the Chavez government, reinstated by a workers’ and soldiers’ revolution that defeated a US-backed coup in April 2002, gained control of the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA in early 2003.

In November 2004, the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) adopted a national policy of seeking to establish clubs on university campuses to build solidarity with the socialist revolution in Venezuela.