The state, the common, and the fracture of Latin America’s anti-neoliberal cycle: A critique of García Linera’s late state theory

This article reconstructs the return of the “state question” in Latin America after the rise and fracture of the anti-neoliberal cycle. It first maps regional debates on the state, dependency, neo-extractivism, neoliberal subjectivation, and the micro-politics of securitized consent. It then analyzes Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia as a “vanguard triangle” of neoconstitutional experimentation, where constituent power sought to refound sovereignty, rights, territory, and public authority, but encountered a decisive meso gap between constitutional ambition and institutional reconstruction. The article argues that the subsequent rollback was not merely electoral: it recomposed state form through extractive fiscal dependence, investment-law discipline, externalized jurisdiction, and emergency governance. Against this background, Álvaro García Linera’s late state theory appears as a diagnostic case. His concept of the common organized through monopolies names the need for durable emancipatory capacities, but risks converting state separation, coercion, and bureaucracy into the privileged body of the common.