The Venezuelan society of 1996 is the result of a set of political and economic circumtances that have been present in our society during the two last thirds of the twentieth century. Oil wealth and democracy --the latter given to us from heaven as a gift since it was not imposed, as it was the case in the United States as a not to be waived requirement of the people-- could not create that better democracy offered in the programs of practically all the prevailing philosophies of what we have called Western Civilization. This oil wealth and given democracy have made us live under the illusion of being a rich and democratic country, with unlimited resources held by a State within the frame of a mostly socially tinted constitutional scheme, under the fundamental duty of redistributing a wealth that was not created but was rather a gift. For he last sixty years, it has been said, Venezuela was offered exceptional opportunities to reach accelerated and sustainable development. If it was not reached it was, in the opinion of many, because we were not able to sow the seeds of oil and, as others assert, because we lacked a duly prepared political leadership and, still for a few more for all kinds of reasons that, to say the truth, as the two former, have the common element of trying to spot the liabilities, forgetting that the problems of modern societies may not be analyzed nor faced other than under most rigorous systemic schemes in a world where everything is linked together.

Where have we been taken by these Welfare State's heavenly schemes? What kind of a society do we have in 1996? How may we improve it?

Venezuelan Society; the Crisis; Scope and Consequences
Let us begin by saying that in these times of an ending century there is a point of consensus among all sectors of Venezuelan society: we are living under the most serious crisis of the last sixty years; this is accepted by both the public and the private sector, by business and labor, government and opposition and by those who study the political, economic, social and cultural problems.

What are the characteristics of this crisis, where is it leading us and what are going to be its consequences?

Personal and Social Security
We have seen how the problem of personal security is no longer under the control of a Government not being able to warrant the security of all people throughout our national territory and for all classes forming the society. Organized crime, specific or associated to drug traffic and use, acts with terror with no hope of relent and control. The citizens themselves, organized as associations, are forced to create their own protection systems, desperately, reminding us the history of the U.S. Far West.

Social security, something that in a modern State is supposed to be an essential system for a better quality of life, warranting health and honorable retirement after a long working life has been featured by gigantic investment of resources leading to results that turn us close to the world's poorest nations. What are the possibilities for common Venezuelan citizen of having access to health services? What is there in the future for those arriving to the age of retirement?

The rule of law
One of the most alarming manifestations of the deterioration in our country's standard of living during the democratic period has been, without doubt, the wrongful enforcement and even the lack of enforcement and loss of force of our legal norms. A few years ago one could say that the standing of the law was in bad shape in Venezuela because, on a day to day basis, there was evidence of a growing situation of anomie in our society. But such lessened condition of the law did not imply a loss of the rule of law. Today the standing of the law is still worse under an unbearable anomie threatening with leading us to total anarchy and, what is more serious, we are beginning so see the first symptoms of the disappearance of the rule of law, when the most fundamental human rights are ignored, when constitutional norms are not complied with and even the judicial body, in charge of controlling the legal system's abidance to the Constitution often violates the provisions thereof. Political interests weigh more than the laws and decisions are adopted which affect individual freedom, with no concern for due process.

Inflation
During the past years of the exhausted welfare State, inflation, an ill against which we though we were immune, has come to exert its negative impact on the production process, hauling it to an uneven fight against the exaggerated and constant increase of all costs and prices. Investment in the production sector became less attractive and a settlement with the International Monetary Fund that has a favorable incidence on the macroeconomic level is not enough to improve the Venezuelans' quality of life. There is no way of improving the remuneration of work --already too low-- without threatening the productive process as a consequence of the impact of a labor legislation becoming unbearable under inflation conditions. The shortage of measures and/or the artificial measures thought to be applied to stop inflation are all actions contributing to the growing impoverishment of people who are faced constantly with lesser opportunities of purchasing goods and services, even at the lowest acceptable standard.

The axis of economic and social development
In the quest for an economic and social development drawing us out of the so called Third World, there are three fundamental axis that, if broken, may no longer contribute to growth and they are: health, education and employment. The disintegration of these axis prevents integral development. Sadly, indicators in these three sectors places us under conditions quite similar to those of many nations that, under our conception of an oil and rich country, we considered poor and without hope. In spite of the fact that expenditure sin infrastructure and services in the health and education sector, for the last decades of the welfare and patronizing State, have reached percentage figures sometimes greater than those of the so called Group of Seven, productivity has been ridiculously low and Venezuelans do not have access to adequate health services and education. Unemployment, according to World Bank figures for May 1994 was near to 16%; loss of employment in the industrial sector, according to figures by the National Council of Industries (CONINDUSTRIA), reaches 20%. And we are talking of unemployment in its strict sense, without mentioning sub-employment.

Population Growth
Comparing Venezuela with some Latin American countries that have similar levels of development, we observe that in these the burden of population is much heavier. However, the exodus from the rural areas to the most important urban centers in our country, and the considerable entry of illegal immigrants have led to exaggerated population growth in some cities, entailing increased critical poverty with the violence attached to it.

Lack of the wished political and social project
In order that there may be options for a change of scenario where Government is no longer able to provide to all the people's needs and proves to be unable to create wealth and rather keeps being a consumer of ever less sufficient income from a patrimony subjected to constant depletion, it is absolutely necessary that opportunities be created to rebuild the country. Spot proposals have appeared, some based on the political interest of not losing clients, some arising from the despair of many to keep holding to their status with little effort, still other on maintaining the same status quo that pays for leisure and fails to reward productivity. Yet, a national project that analyzes in depth the structural causes and proposing deep changes for integral economic development taking off from the base, by creating permanent wealth, although it has been conceived by lucid minds and has been partially shown to all sectors of society, has not found consensus and commitment.

The Venezuelan Agenda, so loudly boasted by the government, may not be deemed as a national project. It is, in some way, a formal document in support of a settlement with the IMF. Had it not been for the hard work of Teodoro Petkoff, the Planning Minister who defends t and tries to complement it, the Venezuelan Agenda would be nothing else but one of many adopted but never implemented plans.

The crisis in values
Since some time ago it has become common , not only in our country but throughout the world to attribute to "corruption" the cause of all evils of modern society. The word "corrupción", in the Spanish language, so rich in expressions but that we insist on impoverishing, is not, in my opinion, the most correct one to express the serious deterioration of ethical values featuring our times. In effect. according the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spanish Language, "corrupción" is the action and effect of "vitiating" ["corromper"]. "Corromper" [to vitiate, spoil], on its turn, means: 2. To spoil, to deprave, to damage, to rot - to bribe the judge, or any other person, with gifts or in other way..." "Corrupto", on its part, is the damaged, pervert, crooked. As we may see [in Spanish] within the idea of corruption the fundamental thing is the action of a subject who corrupts, damages, perverts another subject. If we hold to this conception we must conclude that it is difficult to attribute concrete liabilities in each act of corruption and it is then childish to try to put the blame on some one specifically, on individuals, in groups or sectors of society. If there is an act of corruption its is because there are people who corrupt and people who accept being corrupted. Thus, in my opinion it is more accurate to say that Venezuelan society, nowadays, is infected by a perverse virus resisting all attempts to destroy it and made of the lack of probity, honesty and conscience of our reality. When there is absence of defined ideals and of a general commitment to follow the desired ideals, there is a loss of values enabling to support peaceful and gratifying life in society. The French writer André Malraux said, not so long ago, that the twenty first century had to be featured by a return to the enforcement of strong ethical values if Western Civilization was to stay alive. It is true that there have been attempts in our country to recovered these lost values but, unfortunately, many of those who proclaim such ethical recovery are not always spotless, no matter how strongly they may believe they are. The establishment of objective truth must be the staring point to restore the vigor of ethical values. No more hypocrisy!

Social violence
In absence of a political and social project being able, as I said before, to generate possible options to cast away from a crisis that is not the result of any adverse conjuncture but rather the consequence of s structural condition in the State and in society needing urgent radical change. Public appeasing measures with a clear political bias, meant for misinformed voters may work only on very short term basis. Disillusion with unfulfilled promises, growing frustration from not having access to essential goods and services no longer may be appeased with hopes of change by democratic means, through elections. Social violence is knocking at our doors and threatens to deploy with all its might without any possibility of stopping it without absurd loss of irreplaceable lives and property. Only a national project conceived and fostered by the private sector, business and labor, and accepted by a public sector no longer being able to support itself on an exhausted model is able to avoid the irruption of uncontrolled violence

Summarizing, we may say that the crisis in leadership, of ethical, personal, administrative, management values, has had a bearing on the making of decisions having torn to pieces Venezuelan society. Without rectification, without assuming commitments and responsibilities, without a vision of the future, we shall become parties to the process of dissolving the family and the community: we are exposed to disappear!

Quality of life defies a person's , a family's, a community's and a people's life style. The direction in which we are moving unveils society as a whole. The current situation seems to be the evidence of a human and social pathology affecting our leaders, our rulers, educators, workers, big or small businessmen.

We grew accustomed to the discourse of lies and promises favoring only some individuals and groups with vested interests going far beyond personal ambition; with that we destroy almost all resources of all kinds. We have forced basic principles, commitments and actions to give way, fundamentally, to ambitions reinforcing political and economic power, supported by fraud, treason, unfulfillment, to the verge of reaching the country's disintegration and the loss of constitutionally protected human and social rights. We grew rich with what belonged to the people, by reason of fact and law and, being a country with practically unlimited potential, we have impoverished it in hard to explain ways.

We have a sordid example in what is being done in the field of education. Our budget for education has been and still is the highest in comparative terms among the developing countries. A Venezuelan student represents roughly $800 at all levels of education, however, only 47% of students go through the 9 years of basic education, and of them, only 5% graduated without repeating courses. School repeating worsens the educational crisis inasmuch as it costs $150 million a year, the equivalent of a third of the budget for Primary Education assigned to the Ministry of Education. The summary of this educational drama strongly alters all the economic and social order if we bear in mind that economic and social development may not be achieved separately from scientific and cultural development. Under such conditions of educational poverty there is no way of answering to the requirements brought by the modern world of the economy, of work and the global context seen as a scenario where it is necessary to act decisively in order o achieve integral and autonomous participation as a member of the world community. Venezuela will take its first steps in the way of the next century with a dependent, poor, ignorant adult population, since more than a half of that population will lack the basic reading and writing and four fundamental arithmetical operations skills. More than half of the children of today will leave school before time. These children will be the adult population of tomorrow, with lack of information and of the basic knowledge allowing them to participate in the process of economic, political and social development, and actually, they will be left out the evolution required my the world markets. In their place there will be a generation that will act, among other ways, as a generator of social violence. The crisis of today will be the daily reality of tomorrow , undermining future possibilities of reaching optimal levels in quality of life and integral social development.

The Contribution. An Option
We start from the following premise: the model of the last half century is exhausted, there is no more a rich and powerful State as a general solver of problems and generous provider of variable sponsorships. The new structure of our nation-state must be based on a private sector formed by business and labor, able to assume commitments and create wealth. In order to be successful it is no longer possible to say "who do you know"?, one must say "what is your knowledge"? The fundamental contribution of the private sector must be offered immediately, without losing any additional time to give impulse to the political and social project able to generate possible options to rebuild the country. The private sector may no longer content itself by supporting and accepting the offers from time to time made by the political sector. It needs its own project based on the search or preservation of political power.

A good part of the private sector's contribution to the improvement of society must be framed within its direct participation, participating decisively I the assumption of education as a priority problem and a public cause. It must submit its project and its strategies to cooperate in the reconstruction of the nation on the basis of a new education for a new society.

Those who have the best option and conditions must participate, by assuming direct commitments, in the improvement of the entire society. The elite must recognize that the requirements of the global society may be met and maintained only if they are centered more and more on art, science and technology; its members will not survive if education is weak and inoperative. Institutionally, that is to say within a democratic system , the only strategy for renewal of Venezuela lies fundamentally on the private sector. It is imperative to have the contribution of persons who know the market and the world as they are. Within the private sector,. the role of business is not limited, under a systemic conception, to being the provider of capital, that joined to other factors, leads to production. When we are nearing the twenty first century there is no room for the simple scheme of production based on well defined factors such as capital, work and natural resources- In modern societies, in a world it is no longer possible to conceive Government organizational schemes based on ideologies, be they capitalist or socialist. These factors analyzed by the economists of the nineteenth and twentieth century may no longer be considered in the same way., because the technological, scientific and information evolution do not allow it any more. Business no longer provides just capital waiting for a return of the investment. Business adds another contribution --often as important or more as the financial resource-- : that of its organization, its methodology, its technique, its technology. Such contribution is work, it is something more than capital. On its part, the labor sector no longer limits itself to render services against remuneration --be it salary, wage or compensation--, it participates also in the equity of the business, either through direct investment or additional schemes. A clear example of this participation may be seen in the privatization processes of government owned businesses, where workers become important shareholders. The worker's function is more complex in the process of production. There is appearing evidence of different schemes applied to natural resources. Who are their real owners? Is it Government? Are the individuals? There other factors influencing the use of resources: their importance for the balance of nature subjects them to the interest and control of the entire mankind. Is it permissible to exploit the rain forest, the woods of the temperate zones, the great water reservoirs, without bearing in mind an ecological impact interesting the whole world?

Among the most important contributions of the private sector to the improvement of society one must consider its permanent concern for the social environment. It must de be defended, fostering at the same time the development of the whole human potential. The modern businessman will have, as a consequence, an effective and transcending participation in the rebuilding of a society that we risk losing if we do not rectify.

The private sector's contribution to the improvement of society is, fundamentally, the commitment that must be assumed by its business and labor axis to force the adoption of an economic and social project drawing us away from the structural crisis affecting us. It is time for the private sector to accept the challenge of creating wealth generating employment, growth and better quality of life. To create wealth is more important than to become rich by taking advantage of the opportunities offered by a conception of the State no longer in force.

The task to be assumed by the private sector in order to give birth to the new society must begin my the committee of moving for, with all the potential of a committed group, the adoption of an educational system being able to provide the people with the possibility of competing in a world where knowledge is worth much more than being patronized. One must reach the conviction that the ability is there to accept the relief. The State, as public power, is no longer able to control and direct the economy. Political measures, within globality, may not subdue the market forces. There is no reason preventing the public and private sector from reaching an agreement on this. An end must be put to the fluctuation of facing reality or accommodating to the circumstance. Society will be better inasmuch as the private sector, as civil society, may realize all its potential.