chavez, democracy, and RCTV:
When RCTV's licence to use the free-to-air Channel 2 expired on May 27, the concession was awarded to a new independently produced station, Venezuelan Social Television (TVes), to provide a national space for those previously excluded from the media. This has been used as the latest pretext for an escalating assault against the revolutionary government and people of Venezuela. An international media war has been launched to create the mirage of a democratic protest movement mobilising against the supposed authoritarian, anti-democratic Chavez government. Anti-Venezuela resolutions have been passed by US Congress, the European Union and the right-wing-controlled Brazilian senate.
(...) "Only 140 days have passed" since the new government's inauguration, Chavez explained, yet a "new period has started up, accelerating the process of revolutionary transformation". He pointed to the recuperation of state control over the oil fields in the Orinoco Belt, the re-nationalisation of the telecommunications company CANTV and six electricity companies, as well as the mammoth turnout to register interest in the new united socialist party, the PSUV (by that day, 4.7 million people had registered, reaching more than 5 million by the end of the following day when registrations closed).
(...) Drawing on the "great Italian revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci", Chavez outlined why this process has encountered the reaction of imperialism. Referring to Gramsci's thesis — "a truly historic crisis occurs when there is something that is dying, but has not finished dying, and at the same time there is something that is being born but which also hasn't finished being born" — Chavez explained that already by the 1980s, "Venezuela had entered into a historic crisis … [today] we are in the epicentre of the crisis".
(...) For Chavez, the Fourth Republic represented the rule of the "US empire and its lackeys here in Venezuela, the oligarchy, the bourgeoisie, the class that dominated Venezuela for 200 years". This is the same class, he stressed, "that betrayed [Simon] Bolivar, that killed [Jose Antonio de] Sucre, that murdered [Ezequiel] Zamora", all prominent leaders of Venezuela's 200 years of struggle for independence.
(...) According to Gramsci, the superstructure of the dominant historic bloc has two levels, the political society — "the institutions of the state" — and the civil society, consisting of economic and private institutions, specifically the church, media and education system, which are used by the ruling class "to spread among the social and popular classes its dominant ideology".
(...) Chavez noted that one of the "great contradictions" in Venezuelan society today existed between these two factors. "We have been coming along liberating the state", said Chavez. "Bourgeois civil society used to control" the Venezuelan state, government, legislative and judicial power, state companies, government banks, and the national budget, but "they have been losing all of that". Elucidating the battles that lay ahead for the Venezuelan masses, Chavez said that the bourgeoisie was retreating into its last remaining refuges in the media, church and education system.