In the Chavista Revolution in Venezuela, no one is more neglected than the helpless. There are all kinds of soup-kitchen programs and money flying around, but they benefit only those who can help Chavez politically in return. That excludes many.

Chavez’s revolution is Marxist, and as such, its philosophical foundation is materialism. For Chavez, the materialist fuel driving his revolution is U.S. dollars from Venezuelan oil revenue. This is an advantage no previous communist state has ever had, neither Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea nor Cuba, making Venezuela’s descent into communism one virulent revolution that will be hard to get rid of.

But all those who cannot convert Chavez’s material fuel – the dollars from the oil revenue – into Chavez’s political power are excluded. This includes middle-class people who don’t need Chavez’s money of course, but it particularly means the helpless. Like small children, refugees and prisoners. All of these people have in common an unwillingness or inability to produce political power for Chavez. So, they are necessarily excluded from any part of Chavez’ spread-the-muck-and-vote-for-me populist revolution.

Miguel translates an essay from a Venezuelan newspaper about the defunding of children’s economic support systems in the Chavista Revolution, for political reasons. Children don’t vote, so any aid given by Chavez gives no political payback. Therefore, they get nothing. This dismantling of previously existing support systems for the young and the helpless creates vast numbers of street children, and social disintegration. What becomes of such deracinated and discarded young people who know nothing but this lack of benevolence?

It’s as if Hugo Chavez is creating a new potential class of criminals who will one day make excellently vicious revolutionary ‘enforcers’ in the barrios.

If they survive long enough.

Harry Hutton has a collection of amazing photos of rich and poor neighborhoods. It’s a unique collection of photos, because this is the first time I have seen anyone on the blogosphere highlight the plight of poor Colombian refugees marooned in Venezuela and their unbelievably hard lives in Chavez’s communist nightmare. Like the neglected children, these refugees cannot give Chavez votes, so they too are left to wither in misery. These are the kinds of photos that don’t show up in the news, and for that reason they are extremely critical.

Harry’s photos show that Venezuela’s housing stock is already becoming ‘Cubanized,’ and more disturbingly still, a population is becoming radicalized and communized, a formula for dead-end poverty, which, in a communist state, strips a population of the mental means of ending its misery because their anger is so misdirected.

Daniel has a third instance of the crass materialism of the Chavez Revolution – in the plight of prisoners – who, like children and refugees, cannot give Chavez votes. Venezuela has the worst prison system in the world. It’s an Astrodome of hell where the vicious prisoners run things and the guards just let them kill each other in the closed space. By Chavista figures, deaths in Venezuelan prisons average 34 a month and survivable injuries average 54 a month, an astounding figure. Daniel compares it to the execution rate in the U.S. and finds Venezuela a far more cruel place.

What a heartless society it is where children grow up vicious, and the helpless are left to be murdered because none of them can vote for Chavez.