name Qhananchiri, García Linera repeats the orthodox-leftist viewpoint that communism has nothing to

do with apparatuses such as the parliament, except smash it:

Destroy it! Burn it! Make it disappear together with the government and the whole state

apparatus!, propose instead the workers, tired of being used as servants by the bosses.57

And yet, just as he argues against the potential for corruption inherent in the state-form, years

later the soon-to-become Vice-President of Bolivia also warns against what he calls

a kind of non-statehood dreamed of by primitive anarchism. The naivety of a society outside of the State

would be no more than an innocent speculation, if it were not for the fact that it is thus ‘forgotten’ or

hidden how the state ‘lives off’ the resources of the whole society, hierarchically assigning these goods in

function of the strength of the totality of social fractions and consecrating the access to these powers by

means of the coercion that it exerts and the legitimacy that it obtains from the totality of society’s

members. The state is thus a total social relation, not only the ambition of the ‘capable’ or of the ‘power-

thirsty’; the state in a certain way traverses all of us, which is where its public meaning stems from.58

Even the State, in other words, is ultimately built on and lives off nothing else than the plebeian

57 Qhananchiri, Crítica de la nación y la nación crítica naciente (La Paz: Ofensiva Roja, 1990), 34. As the second half of this pamphlet’s title indicates, even in what is perhaps his most radical text, García Linera already invokes not just a “nascent critical nation” but also the possibility of an alternative, “non-capitalist” State. On one hand: “The current struggle of Aymara and Quechua vindications remits us, therefore, to the problem of a non-capitalist national constitution” (18-19); on the other: “Whether in this communal association there is place or not for the formation of a state of Aymara workers, a state of Quechua workers, a state of Bolivian workers, etc., in any case, will be the outcome of the collective decision and will imposed by the vitality of the natural-cultural-historical dimension in the context of the insurgency and of the communitarian links established in all this time between the worker of the city and the country in order to close the scars of distrust borne from the capitalist national oppression” (28-29).

58 García Linera, “Autonomía indígena y Estado multinacional” (2004), reprinted in La potencia plebeya, 231-232 n. 277. The most succinct overview of the ongoing debate over the possible role of the State in popular, indigenous, proletarian and peasant uprisings in Bolivia’s recent history can be traced in the articles by Jaime Iturri Salmón and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, in the collection Las armas de la utopia. Marxismo: Provocaciones heréticas (La Paz: CIDES/UMSA, 1996), followed by García Linera’s letters in response to the criticisms of his two compañeros, 66-76; and García Linera, “La lucha por el poder en Bolivia,” in Horizontes y límites del estado y el poder (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, 2005), partially reprinted in La potencia plebeya, 350-373.

potential, which can always manifest itself by expropriating the expropriators so as to take back what

for the past five centuries has been the defining theft of modern power and sovereignty in Latin

America.

In a more recent interview, taped when he had already moved on to occupy the post of second

in command of his country’s state apparatus, García Linera goes so far as to suggest the possibility that

the State, provided that it is subjected to a new constituent power, might be one of the embodiments

that “potentialize” or “empower” the communist hypothesis form within. Nobody for sure would have

expected to hear anything less from a sitting Vice-President who has gradually come to jettison his

more doctrinaire autonomist allegiances to the work of Toni Negri in favor of a well-nigh classical

Hegelian or Weberian view. Even so, García Linera’s words as usual are both eloquent and provocative:

The general horizon of the era is communist. And this communism will have to be constructed on the

basis of society’s self-organizing capacities, of processes for the generation and distribution of

communitarian, self-managing wealth. But at this moment it is clear that this is not an immediate horizon,

which centers on the conquest of equality, the redistribution of wealth, the broadening of rights. Equality

is fundamental because it breaks a chain of five centuries of structural inequality, that is the aim at the

time, as far as social forces allow us to go, not because we prescribe it to be in that way but because that is

what we see. Rather, we enter the movement with our expecting and desiring eyes set upon the communist

horizon. But we were serious and objective, in the social sense of the term, by signaling the limits of the

movement. And that is where the fight came with various compañeros about what it was possible to do.

When I enter into the government, what I do is to validate and begin to operate at the level of the state in

function of this reading of the current moment. So then, what about communism? What can be done from

the State in function of this communist horizon? To support as much as possible the unfolding of society’s

autonomous organizational capacities. This is as far as the possibility can go in terms of what a leftist

State, a revolutionary State, can do. To broaden the workers’ base and the autonomy of the worker’s

world, to potentialize [potenciar] forms of communitarian economy wherever there are more

communitarian networks, articulations, and projects.59

59 García Linera, “El ‘descubrimiento’ del Estado,” in Pablo Stefanoni, Franklin Ramírez and Maristella Svampa, Las vías de la emancipación: Conversaciones con Álvaro Garcá Linera (Mexico City: