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