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

In addition to his role as Evo Morales’s vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera is 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 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.

English translation of La potencia plebeya: Accion colectiva e identidades indigenas, obreras y populares en Bolivia published by Siglo del Hombre Editores and CLASCO in 2007.