This book provides a comprehensive history of Argentina’s unemployed workers’ movements, from their emergence in the 1990s to the present. It strikes a good balance between accessibility and academic debate. The overarching narrative follows a historical-chronological structure, while at the same time developing a series of analytical dimensions that are revisited in the conclusion to assess the prospects of the movement. In doing so, it avoids writing a merely internal history of the movements, locating them instead within processes of structural change, political institutionalisation and broader political developments, while also attending to the historical and cultural terrain within which these practices have unfolded.

The book opens with a fundamental puzzle: how did a movement exceptional in its scale, impact and longevity emerge in the mid-1990s and survive to the present? Has its institutionalisation weakened its transformative capacity, or instead helped secure its endurance? Can the current far-right government’s demobilising offensive finally break it? And, more broadly, does the movement’s fate signal the erosion of Argentina’s historically ‘egalitarian’ social order?

The book has a clear structure. It presents the movement’s transformation through ‘five acts’: the uprisings in several provinces in 1996; the movement’s national organisation in 2000, foreshadowing its impact in 2001; the Peronist government of Néstor Kirchner from 2003, which incorporated the movements into the political system; the return of the liberal right in 2016, which paradoxically strengthened them; and, in the fifth act, following an unsuccessful Peronist interregnum, the return of the right in 2023 – this time in its far-right form – with a policy of outright confrontation. The explanation of the movement’s formation and consolidation is organised around four analytical dimensions: the fragmentation of the labour market and of the working class; the openness of the political system to the movement’s demands; the essentially egalitarian culture of Argentine society since its modern formation; and, finally, the activism of its organisers. The book contends that the movement’s incorporation into the political system – although neither peaceful nor devoid of conflict – also contributed to its consolidation.

These lines of argument bring us back to the book’s broader attempt to explain both the emergence and the unusual resilience of the piquetero movement. Longa proposes a number of hypotheses around its uniqueness and its broader relation to egalitarian political culture.

The first question concerns the movement’s exceptional character. Few, if any, movements of unemployed workers elsewhere have matched the piquetero movement in scale, political impact and longevity. The unemployed workers’ movement of the 1930s in the United States, for example, dissolved once mass unemployment receded. In Argentina, by contrast, even after high unemployment began to decline from 2005 onwards, these movements continued to organise a stratum of informal or partially employed workers. Indeed, they came to perform functions associated with the welfare state, organising the distribution of state subsidies for food, education and unemployment itself through part-time work programmes. The ‘market reforms’ of the 1990s consolidated a lasting division within the Argentine working class between formal and informal sectors. This had far-reaching consequences in a system where the mechanism of social integration and social citizenship were historically organised around formal employment – what has been described as a form of ‘citizenship through employment’.

A crucial factor invoked to explain the movement’s strength concerns the thesis that the modern formation of Argentine society, from around 1880, contained an egalitarian component. This is attributed to the absence of firmly entrenched hierarchical structures, whether feudal or colonial, and to the opportunities for social mobility available to a new working population largely formed through mass European immigration. This egalitarianism would distinguish Argentina from much of the rest of Latin America. Egalitarianism is thus described as ‘a key element that partly explains the reluctance of the popular sectors to submit to discipline during periods of crisis or unemployment’ (p. 22).

These are sociologically and historically fertile hypotheses. Yet they also raise a further set of questions about how this egalitarian culture was originally formed and how it was subsequently reproduced and renewed through the 1990s and beyond. In its original formulation, the thesis largely abstracts from class struggle as the mediating process linking these values, social actors and society in a totalising structure. In other words: is egalitarianism, then, an attribute of Argentine society in general, or more specifically of its subaltern classes? And through what processes does this culture become a resource mobilised by subaltern groups in struggle?

Reading E. P. Thompson’s classic work in this context suggests a different hypothesis: egalitarianism might be understood as the outcome of a culture of confrontation developed by the working-class and other subaltern groups, whose historical success lies precisely in its having become embodied in relatively widely shared notions and expectations. One element of the cultural struggle of the 1990s was the denial of both class and class struggle. Thompson’s classic perspective allows us to recover the relevance of class, without reductionism, in analysing social movements that may appear anomalous or singular but are, ultimately, embedded in longer historical traditions.

Seen from this perspective, the class character of the unemployed workers’ movement is somewhat underdeveloped in the book. Earlier studies of the first stages of the piquetero movement explicitly addressed its class component, and so did the movement itself, emphasising that they were movements of ‘trabajadores desocupados’ (unemployed workers), not just movements of ‘desocupados.’ At the same time, the thesis of Argentina’s originally egalitarian society identified social mobility as one of the sources of that egalitarianism. Yet an alternative perspective might argue that Argentina was also exceptional within Latin America because of the intensity of class struggle and the formation of the working class through those struggles. It is worth recalling that successful general strikes took place from 1902, or even earlier, paving the way for the emergence of a powerful labour movement that would, in turn, play a fundamental role in the origins, strength and shape of Peronism.

Beyond these points of debate, one of the book’s particular strengths lies in framing this interpretative hypothesis within a broader historical account while also situating Argentina’s specificity in comparative perspective. The book also appears to offer the first comprehensive history of the piquetero movement as a whole, whereas most previous scholarship has concentrated on its initial period of ascendancy.

The question of egalitarianism also brings into focus a pressing contemporary problem: will the movement survive the fierce assault mounted by the far right in government? What is at stake in this struggle is precisely the kind of political culture that sustained the Argentine social contract. Here again, the book’s interpretative framework situates the piquetero movement within a longer historical conflict over the egalitarian expectations, forms of social citizenship and class relations that have shaped modern Argentine society – while also pointing to dynamics with broader comparative significance for the region and beyond.