This paper offers a work of a theoretical nature aimed to problematize the notion of “commons” in the field of education in the light of a specific experience of commoning in education: the Bachilleratos Populares (henceforth BPs) in Argentina. For this purpose, it deploys the neo-Marxist approach to the commons as a theoretical-analytical grid in light of the movement of BPs. The BPs are free and self-managed high schools created by grassroots social organizations after the Argentine crisis of 2001 to provide an option for youth and adults to finish their secondary education as a response to the gap the neoliberal reform left in this educational modality during the 1990s. After some BPs received state recognition to issue degrees in 2007, their number increased rapidly to almost a hundred BPs in 2015. Drawing upon this empirical experience, this paper discusses the limits and possibilities of commoning experiences in education to enhance social justice and promote social transformation.

The “common” has been explored in the last decade —with several formulations, such as “the commons”, “commoning”, “the common good” or “the communal”— as a loose category to explore alternatives to the neoliberal reform in education (Collet & Grinberg, 2022; Revista de Educación, 2022/395). This project draws upon a specific conception of the commons developed within the neo-Marxist approach (for an overall review of this approach, see Pérez & Zamora, 2022). This perspective gained prominence in the European context after the 2008 crisis. However, commons experiences took shape beforehand in Latin America, within the cycle of social struggle in the 1990s, through a big number of community-popular initiatives —commoning— that were autonomous from the state and the market, self-managed, and horizontal to respond to the (re)production needs of life that the capitalist order systematically threatens (Gutiérrez, 2017). These initiatives include soup kitchens, popular economy cooperatives, recovered companies, and Popular Education initiatives, such as the BPs in Argentina. In this way, these community-popular initiatives are a hopeful reservoir of knowledge in movement built and accumulated in the South.

From the neo-Marxist approach, the commons are defined in opposition to the processes of enclosure (commercialization and privatization), as “the bonds that we build to continue being, to make life be life; links that cannot be limited to institutions or things (water, land, nature)” (Zibechi, 2019, p. 59). Without aiming to establish a replicable model, Federici and Caffentzis (in Federici, 2019) list several features of commoning practices: utopian character, horizontality, equitable access to satisfying social needs, and direct democracy formulas. Based on these principles, the commons claim their autonomy from the market and from the state. Thus, the commons distance themselves from “the public”, understood as ‘which is owned, managed, controlled, and regulated by and for the state’ (Federici, 2019, p. 96).

From the neo-Marxist perspective of the commons, the neoliberal educational reform of the last four decades constitutes an enclosure movement on education and schooling (Saltman, 2018). As a constructive response to this neoliberal enclosure, this approach has explored the guiding principles that should inspire educational commons (democratic, feminist, decolonial, or eco-socialist). However, far little research has connected this theoretical perspective with empirical observation, and none have systematically addressed the intersections between the educational commons and the state. This is a significant gap given the crucial role of the state in the construction, control, and high regulation of the formal education space (Green, 2013).

This paper is framed in the research project EduCommon. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101027465.

This work is based on desk research on the movement of BPs in Argentina. This research has included academic literature and documents elaborated by the BPs and their coordination bodies (spaces where BPs come together to share concerns, aims, and political strategies for their demands). We have reviewed more than a hundred documents. Much of this academic production is marked by a militant research style that links theoretical reflection with the researchers’ own participation in BPs; as such, this corpus holds a testimonial value of the BPs movement itself to an extent. Following a spirit similar to the “systematization” methodology proposed by the important researcher and popular educator Jara (2018), this scholarship has inestimable value in making BPs visible. Some other works, conducted through the lens of ethnography of education (Caisso, 2021; López Fittipaldi, 2019), move away from this objective of visibilization by focusing on understanding the educational meanings that are put into play in these experiences. Among this prolific academic production on BPs in Argentina, we have paid particular attention to scholarship that offers a global vision of the history of BPs and their shared traits (Blaustein et al., 2018; Moñino, 2022; GEMSEP, 2016; Wahren, 2020). This desk research has been enriched by numerous informal conversations with teachers and students of BPs, and several on-site visits to three BPs in the city of Buenos Aires. This analysis did not aim to measure how far the BPs are from an ideal of the commons, but with the objective of empirically understanding the challenges of commoning practices in the field of education. In the analysis of the documents, we have traced and identified those features that allow labeling BPs as commoning experiences, such as their utopian character, which is reflected in the aims of their curricula, targeted to the “political subjectivation" of their students (Said, 2018); their organization around horizontality and assembly formulas in which students and pupils participate (Blaustein et al., 2018); and their configuration as spaces alternative to the market and to the state. We have paid particular attention to the relationship with the state, as it has emerged as a crucial thematic axis in the documents.

The BPs were created in the aftermath of the Argentinean crisis in 2001, when the neoliberal state model developed in the 1990s collapsed. In this context, BPs emerged as a response to the withdrawal of the state in the area of youth and adult education. The specificity of this response is that it was elaborated by grassroots social movements as an experience of commoning in education. In the European context, the 2008 crisis triggered interest in commoning practices. In this regard, we pose that a critical sociological gaze should pay attention to the knowledge already accumulated in the South, which is consistent with Santos' proposal of the epistemologies of the South (Santos, 2016). In this research, we do so through the experience of BPs. The BPs movement provides a large experience about the challenges of commoning in education. In particular, we highlight the challenge posed by the state in the field of education, which has emerged as a key issue in the analyzed documents; and is also a key discussion within the neo-Marxist approach to the commons. Defined as grassroots experiences that are not part of the market, but also not part of the state, BPs will soon perceive the need to enter into a relationship of interpellation with the state: first, to obtain official recognition to issue diplomas, which was a need expressed by their students; and subsequently, to obtain resources from the state. In this sense, the experience of the BPs calls into question the simplistic understanding of the commons as an autonomous and pristine oasis isolated from the state; to such an extent that state recognition and state resources have functioned as a boost for the expansion of BPs.

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