Bachilleratos Populares (BPs) are popular education (Freire, 1970/2005) experiences for young and adults created by grassroots social organizations in the context of the social uprisings of 2001 in Argentina. Guided by a utopian and anticapitalist view, organized horizontally, assembly-led, and autonomous from the state, they constitute an example of educational commons. Since their creation, the number of BPs has continued to grow to reach the number of 86 BPs in 2015 (GEMSEP, 2016).

Drawing upon the neo-Marxist approach on the commons (De Angelis, 2017; Federici, 2019; Laval & Dardot, 2005), we consider the BPs a main example of commons in the field of education. The notion of thecommons designates the setting up of horizontal, assembly-based, and anti-capitalist social initiatives organized by civil society —chiefly social movements— to respond to the social needs of communities and to resist the dynamics of enclosure (privatization) promoted by the capital-state alliance, especially in the neoliberal phase of capitalism. In coherence, these initiatives vindicate their autonomy, distancing themselves from the notion of ‘the public’, understood as ‘what is owned, managed, controlled, and regulated by and for the state’ (Federici, 2019, p. 96).

However, the BPs do not understand their autonomy as just a withdrawal from the state, which according to Hardt and Negri (2012) seems to be the defining strategy of the common. In response to the need for an educational diploma expressed by their students, the first BPs decided to take on the form of a secondary school and initiate a process of dispute before the state (Moñino, 2021) for symbolic resources (official recognition to issue degrees) and material resources (such as scholarships and teacher salaries) that the state accumulates. In this way, the BPs unfold as a contradictory experience marked by a tense relationship with the state. On the one hand, state resources have enabled their sustainability and growth. On the other hand, obtaining these resources comes into tension with their declared autonomy (Wahren, 2020). These tensions are the result of a radical contradiction in the foundation of the BPs, between the stabilizing rationale of state policies (that grant their recognition and material resources) and the destabilizing rationale of their autonomous politics, typical of the commons (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2017, p. 59).

This work reconstructs the experience of the BPs in the City of Buenos Aires from an institutionalist and strategic perspective through two types of qualitative materials: 42 comprehensive interviews with BPs’ teachers and state managers, and a set of policy documents that have granted official recognition to 29 BPs in the city of Buenos Aires. Our analysis of this material is based on the works of Bob Jessop (2016) and Erik Olin Wright (2010). Wright’s work lays the ground for studying radical democratic and egalitarian institutional designs or ‘real utopias’, i.e., experiences of social power led by emancipatory movements, such as is the case of the BPs. While Wright turns his attention to the key role social movements, Jessop’s strategic-relational approach (SRA) provides a plural set of tools for unravelling the complexity of relations with and within state institutions. Our analysis gives response to two main tasks proposed by Wright to address real utopias: (1) to explore their enabling or facilitating conditions, and (2) to delve into their contradictions, limits, and dilemmas. In this way, this work seeks to contribute to the debates on non-state-centric educational experiences promoted by social movements.

This paper is part of 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 contribution examines the main features of the institutional arrangement of the BPs in the city of Buenos Aires, lurking in that interplay of policies —state interventions that have granted recognition to BPs— and politics of the commons that found the BPs. We do so by taking a strategic and institutionalist approach committed to the Marxist-based works of Erik Olin Wright (2010) and Bob Jessop (2016). Wright’s work lays the ground for studying radical democratic and egalitarian institutional designs or ‘real utopias’, i.e., experiences of social power led by emancipatory movements, such as is the case of the BPs. While Wright turns his attention to the key role social movements, Jessop’s strategic-relational approach (SRA) provides a plural set of tools for unravelling the complexity of relations with and within state institutions. Thus, our analysis delves into the conditions that enabled or facilitated BPs state recognition, and the ensuing set of contradictions, limits, and dilemmas that make the BPs an example of radical institutional arrangement inevitably marked by instability. This work draws chiefly on two types of source materials: (1) 42 comprehensive interviews (Kaufmann, 2020) held with teachers in the BPs and 4 state managers (politicians and officers) from the CABA Ministry of Education; (2) a set of public policy documents that grant recognition to the BPs in CABA. Considering that the interviews do not provide access to ‘the truth’, but allow us to access the native sense of the people interviewed (Guber, 2011), we trace in the interviews the discursive-ideological stances and strategic rationale of BPs’ activists. This way, their voices let us distill the ideological and strategic reflexivity of the actors comprising this institutional arrangement, that is, ‘agents' capacity to engage in learning and to reflect on institutional context’ (Jessop, 2001, p. 1230). Furthermore, the analysis of these materials has been enriched by the active involvement of the author of this work as a committed teacher at a BP in the south of the city of Buenos Aires since March 2023.

Findings. Two main elements made possible or facilitated the BPs’ official recognition in the city Buenos Aires in 2008: (1) their pressure actions before the Ministry (marches, pickets, street closures, public classes), and (2) the pedagogic background of some state managers, including the then minister, that allowed them to assess positively BP’s activity. This second element reveals the key role of the ‘withinputs’ (Jessop, 2016, p. 61) of the state. We have identified a set of ‘contradictions, limits and dilemmas’ (Wright, 2010, p. 151). Firstly, BPs are forged in a radical contradiction between the stabilizing rationale of the state policies that grant their recognition and the desestabilizing rationale of their autonomous politics, typical of the commons, and rooted in their horizontal and assembly-based format. From this radical contradiction, the relationship between state institutions and the BPs is marked by contradiction and conflict. Secondly, the liberal governmentality (Foucault, 2008), which is at the foundation of the modern state, is the main limit to recognise the particularities of the BPs, as educational commons. Liberal governmentality classifies the social world according to the dichotomy ‘public’ (state) versus ‘private’ (civil society, including the market). From this dichotomy, the state cannot recognise the emancipatory and desestabilizing rationale of the BPs, which cannot just be assimilated to the private sphere, nor to the public-state sphere. Thirdly, these tensions pose a dilemma for the BPs, which seek to obtain state resources without risking their autonomy. Thus, within the BPs, we identify a plurality of responses to this dilemma, which translates into separations within the movement of BPs.

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