Commoning education, challenging the state: the radical instability of Bachilleratos Populares in Buenos Aires

Abstract

ABSTRACT From a neo-Marxist approach, ‘the commons’ are defined as utopian, anti/post-capitalist, and self-managed initiatives created by civil society autonomously from the market and the state, organised as open access, horizontal, and assembly-led spaces. In light of their organisation according to these principles, this article addresses the experience of the Argentine Bachilleratos Populares (BPs) as an example of educational commons. The BPs are popular education experiences created by grassroots social organisations from the social uprisings of 2001 that adopted a school format to ensure a secondary education diploma for their students. Their school format forged the BPs on a radical contradiction between their autonomous politics of destabilising rationality and the state-centric policies of stabilising rationality. Drawing from the policy documents that recognise the BPs as secondary schools and interviews with 16 BPs activists and 4 state managers (politicians and officials) of the Ministry of Education of Buenos Aires City, this article provides a strategic and institutional analysis of the BPs. This analysis delves into the conditions that enabled or facilitated BPs’ origin, their institutional design in interrelation with the state, and the ensuing set of contradictions, limits, and dilemmas that make the BPs a radical institutional arrangement inevitably marked by instability.