García Linera and the State By: Jaime Ortega

Several decades have passed since the compilation titled The Plebeian Potential burst onto the bibliographies of Latin American scholars, who discovered in it an author whose work had been overshadowed by the repression experienced in Bolivia at the end of the twentieth century. Quickly incorporated as a key reference in the theoretical and political arsenal of critiques of neoliberalism, the name of Álvaro García Linera began circulating ever more widely—that of someone who fulfilled a triple role: politician, senior state administrator (at the time serving as Vice President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia), and, on many occasions, a remarkably capable theorist of contemporary politics.
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Of course, Latin America's discovery of García Linera's work also meant discovering the man himself. Gradually, it became clear that he belonged to the increasingly rare tradition of the author-militant—a figure largely absent during the final third of the twentieth century, when Marxism found institutional refuge in university departments. García Linera moved against that current, combining theoretical sophistication with direct political experience. This author-militant had written several books whose limited circulation had prevented them from reaching audiences beyond Bolivia's borders. Soon, however, works such as Marx at the Extremities of the Capitalist Social Body, The Sleepless Ghost, Lenin, Workers, and Aymaras, and Value-Form, Community-Form all gained recognition, some more widely than others.

Later, shifting political struggles—global, regional, and specifically Bolivian—transformed García Linera from a state administrator into a strategic thinker: a militant committed not to a particular government or party, but to the broader historical project of emancipation. His engagement with the problem of the state was not sudden. Rather, it occupied his intellectual energies before, during, and after his years in government. Throughout the past three decades, readers saw him citing Pierre Bourdieu, rereading Nicos Poulantzas, revisiting Antonio Gramsci, and reinterpreting V. I. Lenin through Lenin's writings on the New Economic Policy (NEP). Unlike much of the region's Marxism, García Linera never adopted contemporary theoretical currents without grounding them firmly in a deep understanding of Karl Marx's work. He continually returned to Marx, approaching him with the respect of a mature theorist—not as an infallible individual, but as a theoretical terrain from which new ideas could be produced for a new historical era.

For this reason, The Concept of the State in Marx should be regarded as the culmination of two decades of theoretical work carried out in the midst of political struggle, shaped by the specific conditions of the historical moment in which this practical-intellectual intervention takes place. The book also represents a synthesis of practical experience: the revolutionary defeats preceding 1989, the emergence of alternatives during the twenty-first century, and the trajectory of a thinker grappling with the transitions of our own time. It is not an entirely novel work, since many of its central ideas have been developed across García Linera's previous writings. Nevertheless, it constitutes a significant political intervention at a moment when the dominant political paradigm established since the 1980s is undergoing profound rupture. His approach to Marx and the state draws both from the classical Marxist tradition and from the central political questions of our own age, defined by the crisis of liberalism. Consequently, the need to rethink the state and imagine new forms of its relevance goes hand in hand with a critique of its monopolizing tendencies.

The specific aim of this work is to examine the state from a Marxist perspective—that is, through philosophical, anthropological, historical, and political approaches that conventional academic disciplines typically separate into distinct fields. The Marxist method consists in thinking about the social totality in all its problematic dimensions, encompassing both social forms and their concrete material content. It considers both ideas and material reality; both networks of social relations and the abstractions from which they emerge. In other words, it seeks to understand and confront the state from every possible angle: through it, against it, and beyond it.

Unlike many other theories, García Linera does not begin by separating the economic from the political. His reading of Marx therefore does not rest exclusively upon the supposedly "political" writings as distinct from the "economic" ones. Instead, he establishes the necessary relationship between the abstract commodity forms of value and the political community embodied in the state. There can be no political community without an economic community; no political bond without an abstract social connection that links labor together. State and value depend upon one another even as they may stand in tension. This perspective distances him from the endless debates surrounding "derivationism," in which he perceptively identifies an old tendency among Marxist intellectuals to position themselves above and apart from concrete reality.

The state is a form of community—a universal social bond—which, unlike the economy, can emerge as a binding and compulsory institution while remaining fundamentally incapable of transforming the essential structure of the value-form itself. This is the key to understanding the revolutionary dimension of the state: it is necessary because it provides the political form of community, expressing a certain ideal universality, yet by its very nature it cannot fundamentally alter the economic community organized through the value-form. No process of nationalization or expropriation, in itself, overturns the way human beings organize production through abstract exchange relations.

For this reason, García Linera's work is especially significant in emphasizing both the state's communal character and its monopolistic dimension in governance. Ultimately, it offers a diagnosis of the political terrain upon which we must act. The contemporary right, in its subordinate role within global capitalism, seeks to eliminate the state's communal dimension in favor of its monopolistic one. Reversing that tendency, García Linera argues, is an essential task for the political left.

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Originally published on intervencionycoyuntura.org. Translated using ChatGPT.

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Author
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Jaime Ortega

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