Chavez opposes individualism...

"We're capitalists, consumers by nature," said 26-year-old Marbelys Gonzalez, strolling through the mall with two friends, carrying a shopping bag filled with five pairs of designer jeans.

"We're crazy about shopping. If we go out and don't end up buying anything, we don't feel good," she said, sunglasses perched atop her bleached blond hair.

Gonzalez isn't a member of the Venezuelan elite often derided by Chavez, but rather a middle-class university student whose spending money comes from her father, a jeweler, and her boyfriend, a soldier.

While most Venezuelans are too poor to afford luxuries, they live amid conspicuous consumption _ cosmetic surgery, SUVs, highways lined with billboards advertising Swiss watches and Scotch whiskey.

Chavez may regularly voice admiration for Fidel Castro's Cuba, but Caracas bears little resemblance to Havana.

Ritzy social clubs, walled-in mansions and private schools are the norm for the wealthy, while the poor live in vast slums where unemployment runs high and gunfights are common. But even among the poor, the consumerist urge is evident in the Nike sneakers on many feet and the satellite TV antennas on cinderblock homes.

Chavez says capitalism created Venezuela's poverty, and a "new socialism of the 21st century" can end it.

"It's the search for social justice, for equality," Chavez said recently. "The capitalist model is perverse. It favors a minority and expropriates from the majority."

In his nearly seven years in power, Chavez has presided over a society increasingly divided by his politics and sometimes shaken by spasms of street violence pitting his supporters against his enemies.

It remains unclear what sort of socialism Chavez may achieve, but his latest moves provide hints _ raising taxes on foreign companies pumping oil, setting up stores to sell cheap food to the needy, subsidizing farming and industrial cooperatives, and handing over some wealthy ranchers' lands to poor farmers.

"Every day it looks more like the communism of Fidel Castro," says Jesus Garrido Perez, an opposition congressman. "The economic disaster has begun."

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"You have to strip yourself of individualism," he urged listeners in one televised address. "You have to strip yourself of the yearnings for personal wealth. You have to strip yourself of egotism. You need to be, simply, useful."