This text is an introduction to the new English translation of critical theorist René Zavaleta Mercado's Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia: 1879–1980. It surveys principal themes in the book and discusses why Zavaleta (1935–84) is a pertinent thi...
For Ren茅 Zavaleta Mercado, democracy is both a stabilising feature of the capitalist state and a mass phenomenon that threatens to shatter its control. I argue that Zavaleta's explicitly contradictory concept of democracy challenges recent theorisations of populism as an antidote to apolitical ...