Abstract
In this chapter, Álvaro Garcia Linera, the Vice-President of Bolivia, and one of the most important living Marxist thinkers, engages with Poulantzas’s idea of a “democratic road to socialism”. Poulantzas formulated this political strategy as a critique of “authoritarian” ways to achieve the transition from capitalism to socialism, especially, but not only, in the Soviet bloc. This leads Garcia Linera to a new interpretation of Poulantzas’s theory of the state, and to original extensions of this theory in light of political events and processes that have occurred since the death of Poulantzas at the end of the 1970s, in Latin America and elsewhere. Álvaro Garcia Linera is not only a theoretician of the state, but also—an uncommon feature among contemporary Marxists—a political leader who has an experience of actually conducting a state.
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Notes
- 1.
Kurt Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, New York: Dover, 1992.
- 2.
Max Weber, Le Savant et le Politique, Paris: Plon, 1995.
- 3.
Elias Norbert, The Civilizing Process, New York: Urizen, 1978.
- 4.
Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.
- 5.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, New York: Dover, 2008.
- 6.
See Chapter One, ‘Commodities’, in Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975).
- 7.
That is why we can categorically reaffirm that the core of the Marxist theory about the state and power is the theory of the forms of value that we find in the first chapter of Capital.
- 8.
See Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, Part Five, London: Verso, 1980.
- 9.
See Álvaro García Linera, ‘Estado y revolución: empate catastrófico y punto de bifurcación’, in Compendio. Discursos oficiales del 22 de enero y 6 de agosto (2006–2012), La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional, 2012, pp. 35–44. See also Las tensiones creativas de la revolución. La quinta fase del Proceso de Cambio, La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional, 2011.
- 10.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
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García Linera, Á. (2019). The State and the Democratic Road to Socialism. In: Ducange, JN., Keucheyan, R. (eds) The End of the Democratic State. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90890-8_1
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