I am very grateful for Anthony Pahnke’s thoughtful review of my book.
The Piquetero movement’s repertoire of strategies (p. 38) exceed the picket (pp. 40–41) and their identity is not constituted by this mode of protesting. The Piqueteros are a network of multiple social movement organizations (SMOs) that form a movement because they share an “us” built by their common grievances and lived experiences in the poorer neighborhoods of Argentina that establish a solidarity bond among informal members. This networked definition (p. 21, n.23) denotes that fragmentation is constitutive of movements, because they are not one actor, but a multiplicity of actors. The specific divisions of the Piqueteros are partially based on ideological differences, reinforced by strong personalized leaderships in highly vertical SMOs. For the movement’s base, sometimes these divisions are irrelevant (fluidity in movement activism is typical), whereas on many other occasions they are crucial because the hegemony of one SMO in a specific territory might imply the impossibility of another SMO mobilizing there.
Territorialization of politics defines spatially specific disputes for other than territorial purposes, very rarely being for the authority over a specific territory. I conceive it as a dispute that has moved central conflicts in society from a neocorporatist articulation for the resolution of conflicts that are functionally defined to a holistic conflict constituted by the multiplicity of dimensions that organize the living experience of the popular sectors in their space of habitation. Thus, territorialization does not mean revolutionary action per se. It could imply a revolutionary territorial strategy, such as foquismo, but it could also mean a dispute over the access to state resources among political groups or a dispute among criminal networks, religious groups, and the police in a neighborhood. That is why I call it a different type of cleavage, which does not institute a new regime type, but rather a diverse type of conflict and—institutionally—a different interest-intermediation regime.
The second wave of incorporation emerged as the partially unintended result of the dynamics between elites, the mobilized poor people, and movement leaders. In this sense, we need to differentiate between waves of incorporation as macro-processes and other micro-dynamics such as co-optation. The relational approach I propose intends to avoid giving excessive agency to state elites while introducing movements’ strategic action. The state elites were trying to divide and conquer, demobilize, and legitimately respond to the social claims posed by the Piqueteros. However, to see in elites a unified and shared strategy is not historically accurate; they improvise to the same degree as they plan, guided by a stock of legacies (p. 42) that condition their action as much as enable them to choose what to do. This same process applies to the Piqueteros (or any movement). This means that actors perform rationally, but not rationalistically.
The first wave of the 1930s to the 1950s was, like the second wave of the 1990s to the 2010s I studied, a reformist process within capitalism to pacify the claims for social transformation of the mobilized poor people, producing an expansion of the sociopolitical arena through incorporation of new legitimate actors. No revolution happened in either wave, but instead social and political rights were expanded, and many policing techniques and social policies were created—directly or indirectly—as a result of the struggle of the organized popular sectors. Without the disruptive posing of a “social question” by the Piqueteros (as the labor movement had done before in the first wave), none of the transformations I studied would have had happened (p. 238). This dynamic occurred also in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, with national-specific paths within a regional struggle for reincorporation (pp. 251–52).
