Hand in hand with transformations headed by President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela is experiencing a surge in demand for socialist classics, which compels editorial houses to reprint works like the Communist Manifesto.
Recent titles of publishers Monte Avila and El Perro y la Rana include the Communist Manifesto and Marx-Engels Correspondence, responding to the interest expressed in book fairs and similar events.
Prensa Latina reports the exhibitors of the Venezuela Book Fair in November said the most sought-after titles were the socialist classics which for years were considered taboo literature in Venezuela.
The avid demand for this type of literature responds to the promotion of socialism as the only system capable of guaranteeing development with social justice in the South American nation, where despite its oil wealth, millions of people live in poverty.
Chavez, who promotes socialism of the 21st century — based on classical socialism, the ideas of Simon Bolivar and original Christian principles — thinks evils like unemployment and poverty cannot be eradicated with capitalist mechanisms.
The collection Basic Library of Revolutionary Thought contains an edited Manifesto with a foreword by Ramon Losada, that stresses the modern value of the phrase: "Proletarians of all nations, unite!".
Losada emphasises this concept lives on together with the rest of the social and economic theory in the Manifesto.
On the other hand, Marx-Engels Correspondence published by El perro y la rana, is a selection of letters written by both thinkers which shows the evolution of the political-philosophical thinking of the two revolutionaries.
The Venezuelan president recently asked his government and followers "to speed up" the process of social and economic change toward socialism. For Chavez, the process of change he has led since 1999 is based on the idea of Bolivar that a revolution "has its own pace and no one can detain it".
Chavez has asked his followers to study in order to better understand this theory, in the face of the media bombardment on the Venezuelan population.
This philosophy will be present at an extraordinary congress of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in August, which will define the socialist model proposed for the country.
The PSUV, already with five million members, was created by Chavez to unify the left-wing political forces, traditionally divided in Venezuela, as a guarantee of continuity in the process of change.
[Abridged from http://www.plenglish.com.]