That only God knows where it came from. Reflections around Álvaro García Linera latest book on Marx state theory.

Abstract

The following article offers a critical reflection on the latest book by Bolivian intellectual Álvaro García Linera, situating his work within a necessary return to thinking about the state, prompted by recent historical developments. The article then outlines the book’s main arguments, reconstructing García Linera’s reading of the Marxian corpus and examining his conception of the state as an abstract, illusory, contentious, paradoxical, and monopolizing form of the existence of the common in capitalist society. Building on this conceptual framework, the paper advances three points of critique: first, the disjunction between the international reality of capitalism’s economic community and its political community organized at the national level; second, the persistence of authoritarian state forms that neither integrate the masses nor operate through attempts to universalize particular interests; and third, the need to construct mechanisms of adaptation to the interests of capital that go beyond the ideological affinity of the bureaucracy. The article concludes by considering the strategic implications of García Linera’s proposal—his search for a form of politics capable of both reappropriating the state and organizing new modes of collective life that point toward its dissolution.