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In a 2007 campaign on a referendum on constitutional change, Mr Chávez lectured a bemused public on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who died in 1937. In essence, Gramsci said that to eliminate the bourgeois state one must seize the institutions that reproduce the dominant class’s thought-patterns. The three most important of these institutions, the president noted, were the church, the education system and the mass media. Among the iniquitous doctrines with which they poisoned the minds of the masses, he argued, were representative democracy, the division of state powers and alternating government. The new education law also lets the government suspend media outlets that affect the public’s “mental health” or cause “terror” among children.