Chávez Restyles Venezuela With '21st-Century Socialism'
By JUAN FORERO
CARACAS, Venezuela - Firmly in power and his revolution now in overdrive, President Hugo Chávez is moving fast to transform Venezuela's economy by bucking free-market planning with what he calls 21st-century socialism: founding state companies, seizing abandoned private factories and establishing thousands of cooperatives and worker-run businesses.
The populist government is reorganizing the country's colossal oil industry, taking a bigger share from private multinationals. Planners are reorganizing the banking system, placing stringent restrictions on lending while creating state banks. Venezuela is also developing a state-to-state barter system to trade items as varied as cattle, oil and cement as far away as Argentina and as near as Cuba, its closest ally.
"It's impossible for capitalism to achieve our goals, nor is it possible to search for an intermediate way," Mr. Chávez said a few months ago, laying out his plans. "I invite all Venezuelans to march together on the path of socialism of the new century."
According to many mainstream economists, the change is simply a mix of plans taken from the protectionist policies of the 1960's and others adopted from Cuba and countries of the former Soviet bloc. It may not be communism - as detractors contend it is - but it mixes socialism with capitalism and what some call improvisation.
Many of the president's grandest plans are put into practice at the year-old Ministry for the Popular Economy. Planners there have already created 6,840 cooperatives that employ 210,000 people nationwide, many producing for the state.
The banking system is crucial to the government's plans. Regulators tightly control interest rates and demand that private banks devote 31.5 percent of all loans to agricultural projects, housing construction, tourism and microcredits, loans to tiny startup businesses.
The new measures - which include the seizure of factories, mines and fields the government says are unproductive - are playing well domestically. Mr. Chávez has an approval rating topping 70 percent.
"I'm not afraid of socialism and never have been," said Rivas Silvino, who works in a diaper factory run by workers and managers under a state co-management plan. "The world is afraid. I say, don't be afraid." ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/international/americas/30venezuela.html?pagewanted=all>
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"The world lies in night of sin. It hears not the cock crowing: it sees not the grey streak in the East. At the first entering ray of light, society is shaken with fear and anger from side to side. Who opened that shutter? they cry, Wo to him! They belie it, they call it darkness that comes in, affirming that they were in light before."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson