Plebeian Power ─ Collective Action and Indigenous, Working-Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia

Best known for his role as Evo Morales’s vice-president, Alvaro Garcia 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, Garcia 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 Rene Zavaleta, Garcia Linera reflects on the nature of the state, class and indigenous identity and their relevance to social struggles in Bolivia.

Alvaro Garcia Linera has been vice-president of Bolivia since 2006, and is a prominent intellectual force in the Evo Morales government. He has written extensively on the indigenous question and class and communal politics in Bolivia, includingHorizontes y limites del estado y el power (2005) and Forma Valor y Forma Comunidad (1995, 2010).