Being Chavista – By Jorge Arreaza Montserrat

1. Being Chavista means always making assessments and acting based on LOVE: Love for one’s neighbour, for one’s homeland, for those who suffer, for the Peoples. It means knowing how to listen to those who most need to be heard and learning, together, how to deal with problems-with common sense and a sense of the commons. Being Chavista means pursuing justice in every action and in every decision.
2. For Chavismo, every circumstance and situation is always determined and riven by Class Struggle. Understanding the relations of inequality that are inherent to the capitalist system and the interests of the contending actors is the only way to always act coherently and ethically in favour of the people, with the objective of creating new conditions that put an end to exploitation and build a society based on harmony and solidarity.
3. Being Chavista means adhering to the strictest standards of ethics and honesty. Corruption and illicit self-enrichment are alien to the essence of Chavismo. The ends DO NOT justify the means. Quite the contrary, the means construe and determine the nature and the consequences of the end that is sought and its consequences in society and nature.
4. Being Chavista means defending and prioritizing the Social Rights of all. The right to life, to peace, to development, to education, to culture, to healthcare, to food, to housing. Every right that may conduce to social happiness.
5. Being Chavista is embracing, recognizing, and honouring the strength of women as protagonists of life in all of its dimensions. It is admiring their creative force, a perpetual volcano and source of everything that is sublime and just.
6. Being Chavista demands a critical and comprehensive outlook in the analysis of each challenge humanity faces in all of its dimensions: social, political, economic, territorial, as well as the potential impacts of any proposed approach or solution can generate within the most vulnerable populations.
7. Being Chavista means making humility and honesty the greatest virtues of the revolutionary essence. The accumulation of wealth, flaunting, are anti-values. For Chavistas, the only values and privileges come from love, consciousness, the recognition of labour, and the smiles of the people. As Ezequiel Zamora said: “Property that is not the product of work is theft.”
8. Being Chavista means always being subversive, revolutionizing processes and spaces to make them more dignified, efficient and sensitive. A Chavista does not merely observe reality, he or she face it, live it, suffer it, cries it, enjoys it, learns from it, and transforms it in order to provide the greatest possible sum of happiness to those who live it.
9. The Chavista assumes institutional roles with the mission of transferring all power to the people, transforming it into People’s Power. As it is of the people, Chavismo must open every channel so that every voice can be raised and expressed. Listening to them, dialoguing with them and building decisions from within the people is an unavoidable practice of Chavismo.
10. For Chavismo, real power is People’s Power; that is, the power of an organized people. Only the People will save the People! All sources of institutional, economic, and political power must contribute to organization, with consciousness and knowledge of People’s Power. An organized people, who create and control the means of labor, production, and distribution, as well as educational process and collective creations, constitutes a powerful social body where national sovereignty and general happiness are placed and safeguarded.
11. Planning is essential to Chavismo. Objectives and goals must always be defined; strategies and tactics must be analyzed to achieve them and determine-with a criteria of efficiency, austerity, and social sensibility- the time and resources required to achieve them. There are no invisible hands nor imposed recipes that can replace scientific and social planning.
12. Being Chavista means being republican, defending the public affairs from the claws of profit, ambition, corruption, and privatization. It means believing in the strategic potential of the collective and in the tactical action of the individual for strengthening the commons. It means trusting what is human, what is simple, what is original.
13. Solidarity is an essential value and immanent practice of Chavismo. A true Chavista develops the most profound empathy towards the problems and needs of others and tries to resolve and satisfy them as if they were his or her own. That is the solidarity in Chavez.
14. Stemming from its constitutive diversity, tolerance is both a premise and a practice of Chavismo. A dogma is useless when it fractures and strains the social body, distancing it from the general and strategic objectives. Differences are always welcomed and necessary. However, there is zero tolerance for unjustified violence, corruption, exploitation, in-equality, betrayal of one’s country, racism, and hatred.
15. Only through love can one think and act with revolutionary coherence. Yet not love as an obligation or commandment, it is love that arises from humanity’s most pure essence and from Mother Earth, that strength that compels us to struggle, to help one another, to transform, to build, to understand. We love, therefore we exist and love further, and we exist forever.
16. “With the TRUTH, I neither offend nor fear.” Although the Comandante attributed this quote to Jose Gervasio Artigas, this expression actually paraphrases the Southern leader. It belongs to Hugo Chavez himself. It is truth that guides and consolidates any project, idea, or action False premises, lies, turn any social purpose into sandcastles. Truth may hurt, but it is necessary for rectifying the path.
17. The raising of Chavista and revolutionary consciousness is at the same time a duty, a means, and an end. Consciousness is the permanent expression that synthesizes the values and principles of revolutionaries. Consciousness enables us to understand the past and the present, and to build the future with the right practices and tools. It is the powerful light that shines over steps and paths, that allows us to understand the circumstances, and maintains the ideological clarity and the unwavering and necessary ethic of our struggles.
18. For Chavismo, Bolivar is the origin, the path, and the destination. Simon Rodriguez is creative and original inclusion; Zamora is the indispensable rebellion to revolutionize everything; Chavez is the synthesis of all struggles and all subversive souls that contribute to justice and equality.
19. Chavistas understand the market’s different faces, the interaction of the actors who comprise it to produce, distribute, and commercialize goods and services that satisfy general needs. However, we caution that the market without orientation and without social government tends inevitably to devour, concentrate, and accumulate all wealth in a few hands, generating the most atrocious conditions of inequality. The economy must serve society and not the other way around.
20. People’s Power must generate a social and communal economy, with its own circuits of social production, fair distribution, and popular commercialization. The organized People must manage the means of production at different scales and generate a new economy that is productive, domestic, ecological, and based on solidarity, one that dis-places the hegemony of the capitalist market at the territories.
21. The established and practiced equality that Bolivar demanded is our course and our safe harbor. We cannot limit ourselves to establishing just and egalitarian laws. We must guarantee, in practice, equality of conditions for each sector of society. There is no equal opportunity without equal conditions. Unequal by nature we are, equal before the written law, but, above all, we must be equal in concrete reality, in the collective construction of what is new.
22. Work is the essence that determines socialism. Creative work that allows one to labor to satisfy the most heartfelt social needs must be the main driving force of the new society. Capitalism is based on the accumulation, in a few hands, of the wealth from the exploitation of the labor force of the humblest, and the destruction of Mother Earth. Bolivarian and Chavista socialism is founded on education and organization for productive work with the purpose of accumulating the satisfaction of needs and social happiness.
23. The mastery of knowledge, its generation and study, is a fundamental strategic process. Integral and definitive independence will be achieved exclusively by mastering the various branches of science and other sources of wisdom. Science is not neutral, nor is it useful in itself. The purpose and social and ethical use of knowledge is both rule and principle for socialism. The democratization of knowledge is an unavoidable social duty. As Jose Marti stated, “be educated to be free”.
24. For Chavismo, reflective questioning and permanent criticism are indispensable for the revision and rectifying of the courses and processes undertaken. The avenues for debate, discussion and constructive criticism much be guaranteed, and tended to in all of the instances of popular, party and government organizing.
25. Anti-imperialism is inherent to Chavismo. Our struggles begin with the resistance of our indigenous peoples and the expulsion of the Spanish Empire from Our America at the hand and swords of Simon Bolivar and his generation. Chavismo respects the self-determination of peoples and is opposed to all forms of domination, especially that exercised {or intended) by dominant elites in countries with corporate governments over sovereign people. Chavismo promotes the balance of the universe, in equilibrium, the multipolar-pluricentric world, without impositions nor subordination.
26. For a Chavista, the will and determination that arise from consciousness are the funda-mental driving force that advance the construction of a world that is just, egalitarian and with solidarity, demanded by the peoples of the world in their struggles, catacombs, and labyrinths.
27. Every just struggle for liberation is valid for Chavismo. Each sector of society must struggle tirelessly for its dreams and rights. However, we must never forget the totality of class consciousness. Sectoral struggles must not divide us, but rather, they must nurture and strengthen our class unity and ratify our common strategic objectives.

* He holds a degree in International Studies from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), a specialization in Social Policy and a Master’s Degree in European Studies from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.

From 2005 to 2010 he was president of the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho Foundation (Fundayacucho). Between 2010 and 2011 he was Deputy Minister of Scientific and Technological Development of the Ministry of People’s Power for Science, Technology and Intermediate Industries.

In the period 2011-2013 he served as Minister of People’s Power for Science, Technology and Innovation, before being appointed as Executive Vice President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, a position he held until 2016.

He was vice president for Social Development and Revolution of the Missions, and Minister of People’s Power for University Education, Science and Technology from 2016 to 2017. For that same year he was appointed as Minister of the People’s Power of Ecological Mining Development and then Minister of the People’s Power for Foreign Relations, the last position he held for four years.

In August 2021 he was appointed by President Nicolás Maduro as People’s Power Minister of Industries and National Production. On March 3, 2022, he was appointed Minister of People’s Power for communes and social movements.