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.