Plebeian Power

Best known for his role as Evo Morales’s vice-president, Álvaro García Linera is also known across Latin America as one of Bolivia’s foremost intellectuals. With a theoretical trajectory beginning in efforts to combine Marxism and Indianism, then developed in reaction to the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and in contact with the mass social movements of recent years, García Linera's magisterial Plebeian Power can be read as both an evolving analysis of Bolivian reality through periods of great social change, and as an intellectual biography of the author himself. Informed by such thinkers as Marx, Bourdieu and René Zavaleta, García Linera reflects on the nature of the state, class and indigenous identity and their relevance to social struggles in Bolivia.

Álvaro García Linera: Reflections on Two Centuries of Bolivia, Pablo Stefanoni

I. The Communist Manifesto and our Present

The Communist Manifesto and our Present: Four Theses on Its Historical Actuality

II. Citizenship and Democracy

Citizenship and Democracy in Bolivia (1900–98)

III. Labour-Movement

Historical Cycles in the Formation of the Condition of the Mining Working Class in Bolivia (1825–1999)

The Death of the Twentieth-Century Working-Class Condition

IV. The Indigenous Movement

Colonial Narrative and Communal Narrative

Indigenous Autonomies and the Multinational State

V. Social-Movement Structures

Union, Multitude and Community: Social Movements and Forms of Political Autonomy in Bolivia

VI. The Crisis of the State and the Period of Revolution

The Crisis of the State and Indigenous-Plebeian Uprisings in Bolivia

The Struggle for Power in Bolivia

Indianism and Marxism: the Disparity between Two Revolutionary Rationales

Bibliography of Álvaro García Linera

References

Index