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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Commons
• strategic analysis
• institutional analysis
• politics

Introduction

Bachilleratos Populares [‘Popular High Schools’ (henceforth BPs)] are high schools for youth and adults created by grassroots social movements in Argentina in the early 2000s. BPs draw on the Latin American tradition of popular education (Freire 1970/2005; Puiggrós 1993) to address the right to education that neoliberal policies had ceased for young people and adults during the 1990s under the governments of Carlos Menem (Ampudia 2012; Elisalde 2008; Wahren 2020). The first BP was created in 2004 in a worker-recovered factory in the city of Buenos Aires (Impa 2016), and their number has continued to grow ever since. In the only census so far, conducted by the GEMSEP research group GEMSEP (2016), a total of 86 BPs were counted, chiefly in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (henceforth CABA, acronym of ‘Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires’) and in the province of Buenos Aires.

2001 is the context in which the BPs emerged. This year marks a before and after in recent Argentine political history. The social uprising of 2001¹ crystallised an emerging political culture that railed against the neoliberal policies of the 1990s and revitalised emancipatory narratives and practices that were utopian-inspired, autonomist, anti-statist, and devoid of political vanguards (Rubinsztain 2012). Organised civil society played a leading role in numerous initiatives in the fields of housing, food, jobs, and education (Svampa 2008). The movement of BPs emerges in this political context and embodies the signs of this political culture.

Drawing upon the neo-Marxist approach around the notion of the commons —and its diverse formulations, such as the commons and commoning— (De Angelis 2017; Federici 2019; Laval and Dardot 2015; Hardt and Negri 2012), we consider the BPs a main example of commons in the field of education. In tune with the political culture of the 2001 uprising, the common/commons/commoning designates the setting up of horizontal, assembly-based, and anti-capitalist social initiatives organised by civil society—chiefly social movements—to respond to the social needs of communities and to resist the dynamics of enclosure (privatisation) promoted by the capital-state alliance, especially through neoliberal policies. In coherence, these initiatives distance themselves from the notion of ‘the public’, understood as ‘what is owned, managed, controlled, and regulated by and for the state’ (Federici 2019, 96). Thus, the commons vindicate their autonomy, not only from the market but also from the state. The terminological diversity reflects the nuances of the debate on this notion. Through ‘the common’, Hardt and Negri (2012) focus on the destituent power of the multitude in the various social outbreaks that in 2011 made the crisis of state legitimacy caused by neoliberal policies apparent. From a decidedly feminist perspective, Federici (2019) and Gutiérrez Aguilar (2017) place the center of gravity of ‘the commons’ in the (re)productive force of community-popular initiatives to respond to social needs that capital-state leaves unaddressed. Thus, while the first link ‘the common’ to the destituent power of the civil society, the latter highlight the instituting force of the civil society to create assembly-based responses to the needs of communities. As is the case of the BPs, both destituent and instituting poles converge in the many social initiatives along Latin American since 1990s (Svampa 2008; Zibechi 2017).

In light of their origin rooted in social movements and their political and organising principles, BPs are a prime example in the field of education of what Federici (2019) calls ‘politics of the commons’, i.e. the kind of political relations that embody the commons. The first of these principles is their utopian and anti/post-capitalist horizon (p. 86), which is especially revealed in their political-pedagogical projects inspired by a Freirean tradition (Rubinsztain 2012) and aimed at the ‘political subjectification’ of students (Said 2018). Second, they adopt an assembly-led, horizontal, and open-access form of organisation (Federici 2019, 95): the BPs are free schools that make their decisions at a common assembly of teachers and students through bonds of camaraderie (Blaustein, Rubinsztain, and Said 2018). Third, built by grassroots social organisations, they demand autonomy from the state (García 2011; Gluz 2013), distancing themselves from an understanding that reduces ‘the public’ to the state.

However, the BPs do not understand this autonomy as just a withdrawal from the state, which according to Hardt and Negri (2000) seems to be the defining strategy of the common, and which Lewis (2012) also observes as the path to commoning education. In response to the need for an educational diploma expressed by their students, the first BPs decided to take on the form of a high school and initiate a process of interpellation and dispute before the state (Alfieri 2019; Echegaray, Dorada, and Gil 2009; Moñino 2021) for resources that the state accumulates: symbolic resources (official recognition to issue degrees and their own regulatory framework that recognises their particularities) and material resources (such as scholarships and teacher salaries). As a result of this dispute strategy, the first BPs gained official recognition in 2007 (in the province of Buenos Aires) and in 2008 (in CABA), with subsequent recognitions in later years (Wahren 2020). As long as these state interventions policies (Jessop 2016, 17)— grant recognition to an experience of politics of the commons, we provisionally will label them as a ‘policy of the commons.’ However, it must be noted that this policy results from the pressure exerted by the BPs and their politics of the commons, i.e. by a disruptive political action led by organised civil society. In this way, the conflictive dimension turns to be crucial: as we will show throughout the article, the interplay between the autonomous politics of the commons and the state policy gives rise to an unstable and contradictory institutional arrangement.

This article examines the main features of the institutional arrangement of the BPs in the interplay of policies and politics of the commons. We do so by taking a strategic and institutionalist approach committed to the Marxist-based works of Erik Olin Wright (2010) and Bob Jessop (2001; 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 of 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, this article addresses the tasks Wright (2010) outlines for making empirical study of radical institutional designs:

first, establishing that indeed the case does embody processes of social empowerment; second, analyzing in as fine-grained a way as possible precisely how the institutional design in question actually works; third, distilling some general principles from the case that constitute elements of a more abstract institutional design; fourth, exploring the facilitating conditions that made the case possible; and, finally, revealing the contradictions, limits, and dilemmas faced by the real utopian design.

(p. 151)

A detailed description of the theoretical and analytical approach used in this article is presented in the section below. We then provide an analysis based on the tasks sketched by Wright. First, we will simultaneously address the first three tasks, showing that the origin and makeup of the BPs account for a politics of the commons that expresses the strength of organised social power in the field of education in Argentina. Secondly, we will describe the conditions that enabled or facilitated the formulation of the first policies that granted recognition to the BPs in CABA. Thirdly, we will show a set of contradictions, limits, and dilemmas reflected by the BPs experience.

This article draws chiefly on two types of qualitative materials: (1) 20 comprehensive interviews² (Kaufmann 2020) held with 16 BPs activists and four state managers (politicians and officers) from the CABA Ministry of Education; (2) a set of public policy documents that grant the BPs in CABA a framework for their legal recognition. In our commitment to critical discourse studies and ethnographic approaches of studies on educational policy, we acknowledge that the interviews do not provide access to ‘the truth’; they do, however, allow us to access the native sense of the people interviewed (Guber 2011) and identify their discursive-ideological stances and discursive strategies (Martín Criado 2014). This way, their voices let us distil the ideological and strategic reflexivity of the actors comprising this institutional arrangement, i.e. ‘agents’ capacity to engage in learning and to reflect on institutional context’ (Jessop 2001, 1230). Furthermore, the analysis of these materials has been enriched by the active involvement of the author of this article as a committed as a teacher at a BP in the south of the city of Buenos Aires from March 2023 to March 2024.

This article contributes to the academic debate around educational commons. While in other areas —such as food (Leitheser et al. 2021), water (Clark 2018), or housing (Montagna and Grazioli 2019)— the debate around the commons has elaborated on the dialogue between theoretical reflection and empirical observation, to date few educational studies have connected both aspects, as noted by Pechtelidis (2021). Some recent studies aim to fill this void of empirical studies (Cappello and Siino 2023; Pechtelidis et al. 2023; Schildermans 2022). This piece contributes to these empirical efforts. However, unlike the other works, here we pay less attention to the more pedagogical dimension of these experiences and focus on the strategic rationale of the educational commons in its contradictory relationship with the state. In this way, our work aims to understand the conditions of possibility and expansion of educational commons.

An institutional and strategic approach

Skepticism toward the state constitutes one of the main defining features of the commons: the ‘commons’ are the ‘other’ of the state form’, proclaims Linebaugh (2017, xvi); and in the same vein Hardt and Negri (2012) assert that ‘as much as struggles for the common contest the rule of private property, they equally oppose the rule of the public property and the control of the state’ (p. 6). This skepticism is based on a commitment to assembly-based governance opposed to state bureaucratism, and on the criticism of enclosure processes in which has historically participated actively (Federici 2019).

Upon initial inspection, this stance makes the idea of a policy of the commons sound like an oxymoron —remember that policy always refers to state intervention—. However, the very observance of reality leads these theorists to revise the distinctness of this boundary between the common and the state, since, as Gutiérrez Aguilar (2017) affirms, the disjunctive between state-centric policies and autonomous politics — which are what produce the common — makes full sense on the idea level, but not in the concrete struggle of social movements (p. 59). The level of concrete struggle opens the doors to the strategic terrain of politics. Here, Hardt and Negri (2012) recognise the strategic value of the articulation between social movements and progressive governments in Latin America in the early 2000s. Similarly, Federici and Caffentzis (in Federici 2019) grant strategic sense to the defense of the public-state services as an ‘intermediate terrain’ (p. 96) in the struggle against neoliberal enclosure dynamics that threaten the collective wealth accumulated in the state. In light of these strategic interrelations —in which the institutional arrangements of the BPs are configured— Mezzadra and Gago (2017) propose overcoming the dilemma between conflict and co-optation between the state and social movements. To do so, however, requires no longer thinking of the government or state institutions as a ‘thing’ and to start thinking of them as ‘a process and a set of relationships’ (p. 489). Given these considerations, we bring Jessop’ Strategic Relational Approach (SRA) into play.

Jessop and Wright provide the theoretical premises and analytical tools to untangle the institutional complexity and strategic play of relationships between social movements’ initiatives and state institutions. Firstly, Jessop’s SRA proposes structure and agency as a complementary pair in relational terms that underscores ‘the importance of the strategic context of action and the transformative power of actions’ (Jessop 2016, 55). Here, structure provides the limits and opportunities in which agency can deploy its strategic capabilities. Despite the state’s deeply ingrained capitalist bias in its matrix, this complementary pair allows ‘policies could work against capital as inimical forces capture the state apparatus or pressure it to pursue capitalistically irrational policies’ (Jessop 2016, 119). Similarly, Wright (2010) expressly advocates a non-monolithic understanding of the state (p. 336), from which the organised social power of civil society can consolidate and expand its struggle if it decides to take advantage of state means for its cause. In this vein, he also underlines the strategic dimension of politics: ‘strategy matters because emancipatory alternatives are very unlikely to just “happen”; they can only come about because people work to implement them, and are able to overcome various obstacles and forms of opposition’ (p. 25).

Secondly, the SRA, like Wright, moves away from functionalist understandings that define the state in terms of ends and adopts a perspective in terms of ‘means’ (Jessop 2016, 25), following the Weberian tradition. To the three classic elements of population, territory, and apparatus, where he includes its resources (force, money, law, and knowledge), Jessop adds a fourth: stateness (or statehood). Equivalent to ‘polity’, ‘stateness’ refers to ‘the institutional matrix that establishes a distinctive terrain, realm, domain, field, or region of specifically political actions’ (p. 17). As he explains, this terrain, far from neutrality, is marked by a capitalist bias that delimits the strategic selectivity of the state. In the strategic sense that theorists of the common find in the articulation of social movements and the state is an underlying reading of the state in terms of means and resources: the state is ‘the site of the accumulation of the wealth produced by our past and present labor’ (Federici & Caffentzis in Federici 2019, 96) and, therefore, should not be left to the commercial interests of capital.

The idea of the state as a ‘social relation’ (Jessop 2016, Chapter 3) synthesizes this set of complexities that surpass monolithic and functionalist views of the state. It attends to the complexity of the intricacies within state institutions or between state institutions and actors from civil society. The strategy of the BPs movement of interpellation to the state is precisely rooted in an underlying understanding of the state in strategic and relational terms.

Politics of the commons at Bachilleratos Populares: the force of social power

We’re children of 2001. Because the bachis³ are from 2001, as are the worker-recovered factories. (Ignacio Moñino, teacher at a BP)

In Moñino’s words, BPs and their activists are described as ‘children of 2001’. Certainly, the many studies on the origin of the BPs (Elisalde 2008; Sverdlick and Costas 2008; Wahren 2020), as well as the founding members that we interviewed, set their seeds in the 1990s, a decade of high social mobilisation that led to the uprising of 2001. An initial team comprising teachers, researchers, and university students, each with their own goals and networks of activism, with ‘subjectivations and motivations’ that can only be explained in that context of 2001 (Roberto Elisalde, founding member interviewed), congregated at various seminars and workshops on popular education held at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). In tune with the political clime of that context, they soon defined the goal of getting beyond the walls of theory and ‘oiling the link between university and territory, public university and territory’, explained Roberto Elisalde.

Thus, the context of high mobilisation is the first condition of possibility of the BPs. In this line, Marina Ampudia (founding member interviewed) bonds the BP’s origin to ‘the rise of the field of the popular in principle, and neoliberal policies, exclusionary processes.’ Her words synthesize the two poles of the politics of the commons: the instituting force (in the field of the popular) and the destituent force (the rejection of neoliberal policies). In the same vein, *Victor (current BP teacher that participated in the creation of a BP in 2007) explains even more forcefully the passage from the destituent moment of the multitude to the instituting force: ‘there was no institutional political project or party that was even the least bit attractive. So that’s why we all became hippies, we went out to take over recovered enterprises.’

In the shift to the territory, this team of teachers, researchers, and university students formed the Co-op of Popular Teachers and Researchers (CEIP, in its Spanish acronym of ‘Cooperativa de Educadores e Investigadores Populares’) with the goal of ‘taking education into their hands’ (Ampudia 2012, 5), using precisely the same expression that defines the commons in the work of De Angelis (2017, 10): ‘take things into their own hands’ . The co-op’s format is indicative of the alliance of the CEIP with the National Movement of Recoverer Enterprises (MNER, in its Spanish acronym of ‘Movimiento Nacional de Fábricas Recuperadas’). In parallel, in connection with the CEIP, the ‘Organización Popular Fogoneros’ created a school for adults at their cultural centre in the Las Tunas neighbourhood (in the north of the province of Buenos Aires) that soon took on the BP format as well (Rubinsztain and Blaustein 2015).

The shift from the university to the territory implies that the BPs were forged in the synergistic union of the know-how characteristic of the world of activism and that of the academic world, blurring the boundaries between both worlds to generate an emancipatory praxis, a synthesis of theory and practice —a defining aspect of both the tradition of popular education (Freire 1970/2005) and the generation of the commons (Laval and Dardot 2015). While the academic world provided a critical analysis of the neoliberal reforms in education, and a set of systematised references on popular education experiences, the world of activism provided the required knowledge repertoire for their strategy of interpellating the state.

Firstly, as Marina Ampudia explained in our interview, some founders had previously studied the international processes of mercantilism and privatisation of education and their introduction in Argentina in the 1990s (Feldfeber 2003). This critical repertoire of knowledge provided a coherent and data-based narrative for justifying BPs existence while delegitimising previous neoliberal policies in education. A datum often repeated by the founders we interviewed reveals the cohesion of their narrative:

At that time we were saying that there were 14 million young people and adults who had not finished high school.

(*Alberto, a former founding member of a BP in 2004)

… a specific need being discussed that was that 14 million young people 15 or older were outside the education system.

(Marina Ampudia)

… we were talking about several million people who weren’t in school, right? The famous, sadly famous 14 and a half million teens and adults outside the education system.

(Roberto Elisalde)

This figure comes from a work led by researcher María Teresa Sirvent (Sirvent et al. 2006), based on data from the 2001 population census by INDEC (National Institute of Statistics and Censuses of Argentina). Sirvent’s work frames this data within a critical analysis of the situation, which she classifies as having a high ‘level of educational risk’. This expression designates the statistical probability of a population to suffer various forms of exclusion due to their lack of education. The data from this census are repeatedly used by the founders of BPs in academic works (Elisalde 2008, 85; Sirvent and Santana 2021, 196) to condense the outlook of educational risk among the young and adult population. These figures powerfully synthesize a landscape of educational need, exacerbated by the reduction of educational offerings for this population group caused by the structural adjustments of the neoliberal 1990s (Gluz 2013). This diagnosis fuelled the delegitimising force against the state in light of its neoliberal policies.

Beyond criticism, the academic field contributed with pedagogical knowledge of popular education useful to ‘take education into their hands’, i.e. to deploy the instituting dimension that forges the BPs. They recovered the memory of the various experiences of popular education and mobilised it as referential examples of its praxis. For example, Elisalde and Ampudia (in our interviews and in their own work: 2015) highlight the experience of Paulo Freire between 1989 and 1991 at the head of the Education Secretariat of Sao Paulo, where he built an unprecedented relationship between public school and popular education: ‘self-management [in Spanish, “autogestión”] within the public domain gives an equation, a device absolutely unprecedented for the time’ (Roberto Elisalde, in the interview). Another example is the Escuela Libre de Constitución BP, whose origin is a proposal made to the Federación Libertaria Argentina —an anarchist organisation— by two researchers (Acri and Cácerez 2011) to open a BP recreating the memory of the anarchist schools of the early 20^th century (Pérez 2014).

On the other hand, the know-how of activism proved crucial in deploying combative actions to put pressure on the state. These actions were decided among the set of BPs assembled in the ‘Coordinadora de Bachilleratos Populares en Lucha’ (Moñino 2021). The Coordinadora was created in 2004 as a space for exchange and dialogue between BPs and has served to collectively define their strategy before the state. The Coordinadora set the agenda of five objectives (Pérez 2014, 15–16): (1) state recognition to issue degrees; (2) recognition as constructions of social organisations and worker-recovered factories, excluding NGOs and private schools; (3) selection of teachers without state interference; (4) no state interference in the pedagogical project of each BP; (5) funding for teachers’ salaries. This agenda reflects their struggle to obtain resources from the state (points 1, 2 and 5) while preserving the autonomy of their projects (points 3 and 4). To this day, these points continue to be the Coordinadora’s requests. From this space, various pressure actions were organised to interpellate the state:

Protests, social mobilisations… yes. The format was the street and mobilisation, collective action. (Marina Ampudia)

… we went to wage an entire battle, already on the streets with the Coordinadora, marches, pickets, street closures, public classes, protests against officials at the Book Fair… (*Alberto)

In this set of actions, the accumulated know-how of social organisations, who had internalised the meaning and value of direct action, was crucial:

… blocking major streets, going to the legislature, to the different legislatures to protest, that’s how it was achieved, let’s say, with this dynamic of struggle and interpellation to public policy, which, well, the worker-recovered companies and social movements had incorporated with … with clarity. Right? Thus, that idea that the recovered companies had when they said: ‘we snatch [in Spanish “arrancamos”] from the state’, recognitions or resources, in general.

(Roberto Elisalde)

More importantly, the actual implementation of the BPs is itself a direct action:

We were starting de facto, right? We filled in the paperwork and at the same time, we started working, teaching. And we knew that this was also an element. We addressed a need and it was a way to put the pressure on the state, on public policy. How could they not recognise an educational act? How could they not recognise the demand for education from our fellow citizens in the neighbourhoods? So, we pressed from that place for its recognition. In other words, the school got started without being recognised.

(Marina Ampudia)

The words of both Elisalde and Ampudia bring together some key arguments for the strategic rationale of the BPs before the state. Firstly, their ‘starting the facto’ is a direct action of instituting nature, typical of Latin American social movements (Svampa 2008; Zibechi 2017) and of the politics of the commons (Federici 2019). Once created, BPs justify their existence in the legitimacy of their praxis giving a response to a universal right to education, which is globally recognised and a state’s responsibility. Situating the state as a guarantor of the right to education —an idea that BPs’ activists reproduce in various texts: (Ampudia and Elisalde 2015, 164; Moñino 2021, 50; Rubinsztain, Said, and Stratta 2015, 72; Sirvent and Santana 2021, 196) reinforces their self-legitimation: as long as the state is not giving a satisfactory response, their praxis is fully legitimate. In this way, they adopt the language of rights, which paradoxically is the basis of the liberal state institutional design and its notion of citizenship (Jessop 2016, p x.). However, for them, the subject of rights is not a passive one but an activist subject that organises collectively in social movements to produce rights (Bustos 2021).

On another note, their combative tone must be highlighted. Their repertoire of actions, typical of the social movements and the politics of the commons, reveals their distrust of institutional channels of liberal democracy and their identification as activists of organised civil society. Their combative spirit is also reflected in their vocabulary:

The bachis we ask of the state. No, we don’t ‘ask’. We ‘demand’ could be a little closer, but I like even more: ‘We try to snatch from the state’. We try to snatch resources, we try to snatch what is ours.

(Julián Larrea, teacher at a BP)

Larrea’s reflexivity is founded on a strategic comprehension of the state in term of ‘means’ that dovetails with Jessop’s approach. Furthermore, Federici’s idea that state resources are the ‘wealth produced by our past and present labor’ (2019, 96) resonates in his words. Therefore, like Elisalde in the above quotation, Larrea firmly adopts a combative verb, ‘snatch’, to describe their actions, ‘snatch what is ours’, discarding more conciliatory verbs.

Finally, both academic and activist know-hows come together in the daily praxis of the BPs, as discussed in numerous works (Aguiló and Wahren 2014; Blaustein, Rubinsztain, and Said 2018; Rubinsztain 2012; Said 2018). As a show of the emancipatory narratives of 2001, the BPs are deployed as a prefigurative praxis that advances a utopian future in the present (Ouviña 2012). Popular education is always a political and political-pedagogical stance (Puiggrós 1993), and demonstrating this, the BPs explicitly assume a praxis directed towards political subjectivation (Said 2018), understood in terms of consciousness-raising (Freire 1970/2005). This consciousness-raising objective is first displayed in their curricular content. The recognition of the BPs in CABA enables them to develop the curriculum of Auxiliary Expert in Community Development, regulated in Resolution 601 of 2001 by the Ministry of Education of CABA (2001). This resolution lists the areas and sub-areas of knowledge and their hourly load in each of the three years of study, without further detail of content. In an exercise that illustrates the margin of resignification that opens in the process of policy enactment (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012), each BP guides and reinterprets the content of these areas and sub-areas according to their own political-pedagogical projects, and based on the decisions that are defined in their assembly. For instance, in our interview with *Sol, a teacher in a BP created by a Peronist group, she highlighted that their BPs is distinguished by a gender perspective that permeates all areas. Another example is provided by the BPs set up in worker-recovered companies, which address community development contents through the lens of labour cooperativism. Beyond these contents, the assembly format is also part of the political-pedagogical device of the BPs (Caisso 2017), as well as a space that allows articulating and preserving the horizontality between teachers and students (Blaustein, Rubinsztain, and Said 2018).

Interplay between autonomous politics of the commons and state policies

In accordance with the analytical framework proposed by Wright (2010), this section delves into the facilitating conditions that made possible the official recognition of the BPs in CABA. In 2008, the Ministry of Education (2008) in CABA enacted Resolution 669 of 2008, which granted official recognition to nine BPs, enabling them to issue official secondary degrees. Through interviews with BPs activists and ministry officials who participated in the negotiation and elaboration of this resolution, we have identified two crucial elements that either made possible or facilitated its enactment: the pressure exerted by the BPs on the ministry and the pedagogical background of certain officials.

Like the BPs’ activists —as we have shown in the previous section—, the state managers that we interviewed also recognise the effectiveness of the pressure actions of the BPs before the Ministry:

… it was a very conflictive time, they [other people] would come to the ministry’s door to… to demand things. But these [the BPs] … I remember I wondered, ‘here, why?’. The others that came was because there had been some hint of prior conflict. These no, they came directly with the drums.

(Mariano Narodowski, Minister of Education of CABA from 2007 to 2009)

… they came [to the ministry], blocked the street, and someone had to attend to them (…) They get things done with that kind of pressure… The first thing they are going to get in the City is a resolution that recognises them… This, in 2008.

(*Valeria, official in the legal advisory area of the Ministry of Education of CABA)

In *Valeria’s narrative, Resolution 669 of 2008 is the immediate result of the direct actions of the BPs (2008). Furthermore, at another point in our interview, she observed that these actions were the only way the state could ‘detect their existence’. In the same vein, the then-minister recognises the effectiveness of these pressure actions to made BPs visible to the ministry. However, it is important to situate these actions in their context (‘it was very conflictive time’ states Narodowski). Likewise, *Víctor, a BPs’ activist who participated in negotiations on this resolution with the Ministry, stated that ‘all this could happen because there was a level of turmoil [in Spanish, “quilombo”] in the streets, of social effervescence, of…, which was really tremendous.’ Concerning the importance of the context, it is worth considering that ‘politics is the art of the possible’ (Jessop 2016, 92). The strategic study of the limits and possibilities granted by the context is part of that art. In this vein, the scenario of social effervescence appears for the participants as a cornerstone that broadened the terrain of the possible in 2008.

In addition to the effectiveness of these pressure actions, we have identified a second element that facilitated the official recognition of the BPs: the presence of state managers with pedagogical backgrounds in the ministry. Their backgrounds are part of the state’s ‘withinputs’, the internal intricacies of the state that make up state institutions (Jessop 2016, 67). When asked for his motivation to enact Resolution 669 of 2008, the then-minister gave us the following response:

Why did I do it [approve the recognition resolution]? Eh… First, because I always respected them, let’s say, professionally. That was very important to me, it’s very important that… I care… I mean, all’s well that’s done well. And these [the BPs], at least at that time, I don’t know now, were fine (…) I believe that those alternatives, which I also studied historically and published more academically, those alternatives to schooling are valuable. I have always been a little in disagreement with proposing that public schooling had to be state-run.

(Mariano Narodowski)

The former minister bases his positive assessment of BPs on his understanding of alternative education experiences, which he ‘professionally’ respects. Furthermore, in his argument, he emphasises his extensive knowledge of the subject, successfully highlighting his academic authority. He then offers a second reason: similar to BPs, he did not confine ‘the public’ to strictly state-owned entities.

This positive assessment is shared by other state managers with pedagogical backgrounds who had joined the ministry with the former minister:

… what they do is very good, because it’s closer, closer than a more institutionalised school, obviously, more, more sensitive, it adapts to their needs.

(María del Carmen Toro, director of the Area of Youth and Adult Education between 2010 and 2015)

[The BPs] advocate popular resistance and subscribe to a current of popular education, which is Paulo Freire’s. So that had to be understood too. You couldn’t override that aspect. There you had to understand….

(*Teresa, state manager since 2007)

In the statements of María del Carmen Toro and *Teresa, we discern an acknowledgment of the specificities of popular education, made possible through their prior pedagogical knowledge. The former positively values its adaptive capacity, while the latter emphasises its respect for the explicitly political dimension (‘popular resistance’) of these initiatives, a factor that could not be encroached by the ministry. Both perspectives are rooted in an understanding of the tradition of popular education.

In the case of these three state managers, we observe that their positive assessment of the BPs becomes possible by a reflexivity formed in their previous studies before entering the ministry. Indeed, during our interview, *Teresa insisted on the importance of these pedagogical knowledge to comprehend the experience of the BPs and their demands before the ministry. She continued in her position under the administration of the subsequent Minister of Education, Esteban Bullrich (2010–2017). During our interview, she drew a distinction between the team of ‘academic excellence’ formed with Minister Narodowski, and the team of ‘political excellence’ that gained prominence with Minister Bullrich. From this contrast, she points to ‘internal pushback’ among those who were not educators to advance in negotiations with the BPs: ‘for someone who is not a teacher, I tell you because the answers were… I got them myself, “but they are loafers who don’t do a thing, they want to live off the state”’. *Teresa’s description accounts for internal conflicts within state institutions, which is also part of the withinputs of the state.

The progressively diminishing weight of pedagogic profiles within the ministry, coupled with the ebb in social mobilisation, especially since 2015, explains the closing of the window of opportunity to advance in their demands: since 2015, no other BP has been recognised in CABA. Up until that point, a total of 29 BPs had been recognised through various ministerial resolutions. However, as we will delve into in the following section, not all the BPs are recognised under the same legal formula. In addition, by our own count, we have identified a total of 15 BPs currently operating without recognition in CABA. In a sign of mutual support among BPs, students who attend an unrecognised BP receive their degrees through others that are recognised.

Contradictions, limits, and dilemmas: an unstable institutional arrangement

In this section, we will break down the contradictions, limits, and dilemmas faced by the BPs in their trajectory of dispute with the state, which is the fifth task proposed by Wright (2010).

Firstly, we identify a fundamental contradiction between the rationale of the politics of the commons and the rationale of the policies that grant their recognition. While the latter unfolds as the action of the liberal-capitalist order to stabilise the social, the former is guided by an instituting and opening impulse, in which the people excluded disrupt the order (Gutiérrez Aguilar 2017). With different categories, this same opposition of rationalities is referred to by other theorists of radical democracy: ‘the police’ versus ‘the politics’ (Rancière 1996/2012), or ‘heteronomy’ versus ‘autonomy’ (Castoriadis 1997). The opposition of neo-Marxist authors between the commons/the common and the state is precisely based on their commitment to radical democratic formulas, from which they distance themselves from state-centric socialist formulations and their bureaucratic rationality (Pérez Fernández and Zamora García Forthcoming). The destituent and instituent forces that define the commons are signs of their destabilising rationale.

The following reasoning from *Teresa, in her role as a state administrator, and Julián Larrea, as an activist teacher of a BP, reflects both rationalities:

… we set out as if we had to normalise, so to speak, or box up three aspects they [the BPs] had: the pedagogical […]. Then we had another issue that was labour-related. Those teachers… had to have a degree-backed qualification that they are trained to be teachers. And the third aspect […] was space.

(*Teresa, state manager)

… this experience of BPs transcends what a school is within the State. It transcends… beyond the fact that afterward along the way you have to be part [of the state] and so on, but its shape and its essence transcend that a bit, like there won’t be a figure of the state… that seems like something that is good that they achieve… There won’t be a figure of this capitalist, patriarchal state —whatever we can say— that can tell us what we are.

(Julián Larrea, teacher at a BP)

The stabilising rationality of policies crystallises in *Teresa’s reflexivity in terms of ‘normalisation’ in three specific areas: pedagogy, which refers to the curriculum; labour, which refers to teacher selection; and space, since the BPs operate in a wide variety of spaces, such as recovered enterprises, soup kitchens, or sports clubs. In the opinion of *Teresa these spaces not always were suitable for teaching activities. Precisely, the autonomy vindicated by the BPs especially refers to self-management in curriculum and teacher selection (Blaustein, Rubinsztain, and Said 2018), which are two issues historically regulated in detail by the state. In contrast with the stabilising aim posed by *Teresa, Larrea uses three times the verb ‘to transcend’ to point to a destabilising rationale: for him, the BPs go beyond the norms of the school and the state and challenge the established order. This rationale is the reason why the BPs cannot just be assimilated within the current school regulation. For Larrea, there is an impossibility of synthesis between the policies that grant them recognition and their day-to-day politics: the state cannot contain the experience of the BPs because their overflowing impulse always transcends the state. Along with this, he critically identifies the state’s involvement in the capitalist order as the radical cause that makes this synthesis impossible. In this way, he is recognising what Jessop calls ‘strategic selectivity of the state’, i.e. the institutional arrangements that help or hinder certain class interests, and that are the result of the sedimentation of past interventions (Jessop 2016, 56). Here, Larrea understands that its capitalist bias hinders the advancement of the demands of BPs that are fighting against that capitalist matrix.

Thus, created under a destabilising rationality, typical of the autonomous politics of the commons, the decision of BPs to become schools —which requires state intervention forges them as a space marked by contradiction. *Alberto restates this contradiction recalling what they were told from the ministry in response to their demands:

[The state officials] said, ‘yes, you want us to give you degrees, teacher salaries, scholarships for students, infrastructure, but without us controlling anything’; ‘Yes,’ we said, ‘that’s exactly right’.

(*Alberto)

For state rationality, characterised as bureaucratic and normalising (according to *Teresa’s words), the reception of resources requires control. However, this control contradicts BPs autonomy. In this context, viewing the state as an accumulator of resources produced by our labour (as also pointed out by Federici in 2019), the BPs aim to communalise those resources enclosed by the State —remember here Larrea’s words, ‘we try to snatch [from the State] what is ours.’ Thus, demanding resources while rejecting control is not contradictory for the BPs, but a legitimate demand.

Building upon the insights of Argentine thinker Thwaites Rey (2004), the BPs decision to transform into schools raised a crucial question regarding the role of the state: should they reject the state as a legitimising force for the capitalist system, or should view it as a ‘conquest’? Thwaites Rey, much like the BPs, argues that the answer does not simply lies in adopting one of these two positions, but rather in understanding the complexity of the interrelationship with the state. Thus, she asserts that the challenge is to acknowledge this contradiction and act upon it (Thwaites Rey, 2004, 74). Acting upon this contradiction allowed to expand their experience. When the BPs were recognised for the first time in 2007 (province of Buenos Aires) and 2008 (city of Buenos Aires), the creation of BPs accelerated before that horizon of recognition (Wahren 2020). Thus, receiving state resources facilitated their sustainability and boosted their expansion.

Concerning the limits, we identify the main limitation in the liberal stateness (Jessop 2016, 45). The interplay between the autonomous politics of the commons —displayed by the BPs— and the policies —enacted by the state— exposes the limit of the liberal stateness to recognise radical institutional designs. Liberal stateness is founded in what Foucault (2008) denominated liberal governmentality, i.e. a rationale that organises the social in two spheres: the public sphere, which corresponds to the state; and the private sphere, which corresponds to the civil society, and the market. Different rationalities govern each sphere: interventionism belongs to the state, while self-regulation —the invisible hand belongs to the market. The political culture that emerged in the uprising of 2001 in Argentina challenged this dichotomy claiming a notion of ‘the public’ beyond the state sphere and its bureaucratic logic (Rubinsztain 2012). It is a notion of ‘the public’ close to the theories of radical democracy and the neo-Marxist approach to the commons. In this vein, when the BPs broke into the Ministry in 2008 seeking recognition, they ran up against the limits of statehood to recognise them as a ‘public’ experience:

In my opinion, they end up being like proposals from the private sphere. I mean, social, yes, but private is also social. […] In other words, they are undertakings that come out of the private sphere, which end up relinquishing their ideals or their ideal of total autonomy when they need to accredit knowledge or to issue certification. And even more so when you need to pay your teachers.

(*Valeria, state manager, with functions in legal advice)

*Valeria participated in negotiations with the BPs’ activists for the elaboration of Resolution 669 in 2008 (Ministry of Education of CABA 2008) and some subsequent ones. Thus, she was a key part of the withinputs that made possible BPs recognition in CABA. Her reasoning for assigning the BPs to the private sphere is based on the ‘public versus private’ and ‘state versus civil society’ dichotomies characteristic of liberal statehood (Jessop 2016). From these dichotomies, the public sphere unfolds from and within the state and is defined by its procedural legitimacy. Here, compliance with the procedures for accreditation and for hiring teachers is what defines the public-state sphere as such. *Valeria’s reasoning relies on this idea of procedural and bureaucratic legitimacy that the BPs challenge. From this perspective, the state paying teacher salaries requires abiding by the model of public appointments set out in the Law 14.473 - Teaching Staff Statute of 1958 (República Argentina 1958) for state schools to hire teachers, through a centralised and open competition model. However, for the BPs, this model limits their autonomy.

As evidence of this limitation posed by the liberal governmentality, the initial BPs were first recognised as private centres: in 2004, the BP IMPA quickly obtained recognition as a private institution (Impa 2016). However, as their founders explained in our interviews, being recognised as a private centre was not a satisfactory solution; rather, it served as an interim measure to advance their objectives and was also a prerequisite for grating degrees. It is noteworthy that many of these founders held a staunch stance against neoliberal policies and the market-oriented approach to education, aligning with the anti-neoliberal sentiments of the 2001 uprising. From this stance, they rejected being recognised as a private managed school.

As a result of negotiations between state managers and BP activists, Resolution 669 (Ministry of Education of CABA, 2008) recognised nine BPs, including IMPA, under an ambiguous formula that is neither state nor private. This resolution created an ad hoc formula, a registration record: the BPs had to register with the General Directorate of Educational Planning, which falls under the Undersecretariat of School Inclusion and Pedagogical Coordination. This resolution did not place the BPs under the jurisdiction of either the state or private sphere, as each of these two administrative modalities has its own functional unit within the ministry, but Educational Planning was not dependent on either of them. However, this ambiguous formula was not satisfying for all the BPs in CABA. For a significant faction of the BPs of CABA gathered in the Coordinadora, this formula was seen as merely an intermediate step. Their ultimate goal was to gain recognition as state public schools, which would grant access to material resources, especially teacher salaries. However, for other BPs, becoming state-run centres could jeopardize their autonomy. In this regard, the contradiction between their autonomous politics and the heteronomous policy of the state becomes a dilemma for the BPs, leading them to take different courses of action. As Gutiérrez Aguilar (2017) explains, in the concrete struggle of the social movements and their strategic decision, this contradiction unfolds as a ‘choice that distinguishes and separates individuals and groups’ (p. 59). In this way, the BPs made different choices before the dilemma, resulting in the splintering of the BP movement in CABA: different BPs abandoned the Coordinadora due to disagreements with its demands.

We identify in the Coordinadora the first response to this dilemma. Under the motto ‘public and popular school’ (Moñino 2021) they orient ‘a participatory management with the community participating in social movements, unions, as well as education system officials, teachers, and students’ (Marina Ampudia, in the interview). From this reasoning, they insist on being recognised as experiences within the state but advocating reconfiguring state procedures along participatory lines. They thus aim to challenge the bureaucratic-procedural legitimacy as it is established. From this stance, Resolution 669 of 2008 was deemed insufficient because it did not acknowledge teacher salaries. This situation changed in 2011 with the Decree 406 of 2011 (Ministry of Education of CABA 2011). This decree granted recognition to the BPs as state managed school centres under the figure ‘Experimental Educational Management Units’, a previously existing figure that the ministry casually revived —as *Valeria described in her interview. As the state can only grant teacher salaries to state schools, this formula made it possible to recognise teaching staff and address wage demands.

However, not all the BPs agreed with this route of demands, and abandoned the Coordinadora in 2009, thus generating a second course of action to face the autonomy versus heteronomy dilemma. This collective of BPs, some of them more closely inspired by anarchist principles, rejected being recognised as state centres to protect their autonomy, especially to select their teachers. The expression ‘public non-state’ condenses their understanding of the public (RBPC, Red de Bachilleratos Populares Comunitarios 2011). This collective of BPs, therefore, has recognition to issue degrees but does not receive state material resources for its support (Pérez 2014; RBPC, Red de Bachilleratos Populares Comunitarios 2011). Resolution 669 of 2008 is their legal framework.

The third response calls for recognition of the BPs under a third legal formula, which is neither private nor public-state managed: social and cooperative management. This management modality was innovatively introduced by the National Education Law 26.206 of 2006 (article 13) (República Argentina 2006). As set forth by the Federal Council of Education, made up of provincial ministers of education in a non-binding draft (Resolution 33 of 2007), this modality is intended to recognise the particularities of popular education experiences created by social organisations since 2001, such as BPs. However, this management category has not been legislatively developed at the national level and has made little legislative progress in the provinces. CABA, for example, does not have any specific legislation. Therefore, any BP in CABA is currently recognised under this formula. Nevertheless, this group of BPs considers social and cooperative management as the best formula to receive state resources without compromising their autonomy in terms of teacher selection:

We believe that state intervention would end up bringing in a lot of teachers who may not be in line with our political and pedagogical project.

(*Sol, teacher at a BP from a Peronist group)

… because we also have the issue of recognising [teacher] suitability, where we move away a little from the Teaching Staff Statute of public schools.

(*Sofía, teacher at a BP)

Under the formula of ‘social and cooperative management’, the teacher selection would not be bound by the procedures established for state-managed schools, according to the Teaching Staff Statute of 1958 (República Argentina 1958). Thus, the BPs could receive material resources while maintaining autonomy to select their teachers. The selection process would be guided by the concept of ‘suitability’ [‘idoneidad’ in Spanish], allowing each BP to establish their criteria.

Some BPs activists within the Coordinadora strongly oppose to social and cooperative management modality for two main reasons. From an ideological-identity motivation, they align their praxes with the struggles in defense of state education, especially in light of the historical significance that education for young people and adults holds within the Argentine educational system (Moñino 2021). Secondly, they contend that this proposal renders the labor rights of BPs teachers more precarious compared to those in BPs recognised as state centres. Unlike state-run schools —including BPs recognised as state-run centres— where the state is obligated to pay teachers’ salaries, under social and cooperative management, the responsibility for salaries is shifted to the hands of the BPs.

This set of contradictions, limits, and dilemmas reveals the institutional instability of the BPs in CABA. This instability arises from the constraints imposed by the liberal state to their recognition. More significantly, it indicates that their destabilising rationale remains vibrant. A fully or tendentially stable institutional arrangement between the state and the BPs would account for a depletion of its destabilising force and would mark the conclusion of their utopian-styled praxis, which characterises the BPs as commons.

Conclusions

This article has offered an institutional and strategic analysis of the BPs in the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina) as a main example of commons in the field of education. The BPs are popular education experiences for youth and adults that emerged in the heat of the 2001 social uprising in Argentina. Considering the neo-Marxist approach to the commons, we identify in the BPs the main organisational principles of the anti/post-capitalist commons: utopian horizon, open access, and direct democracy formulas. According to these principles, they vindicate their autonomy, not only from the market but also from the state. However, despite their claimed autonomy, they chose to operate as secondary schools. This decision forges the BPs as a contradictory and unstable institutional arrangement in the interplay between their autonomous politics of the commons and the stabilising policies —state interventions— that grant their recognition.

Drawing from qualitative sources (policy documents and interviews), we have addressed the tasks proposed by Wright (2010) to examine radical institutional designs, as is the case of the BPs. Firstly, we have shown that the BPs are an experience of social power since they are founded by emancipatory grass-roots territorial organisations to ‘produce rights’ (Bustos 2021) that the guarantor state is not fulfilling. Secondly, we have identified two key elements that enabled or facilitated the recognition of the BPs by the Minister of Education of CABA: combative collective action deployed in a social context of high mobilisation, and a pedagogical background among state managers in the Ministry of Education that positively assessed their educational practices.

Thirdly, we have shown the set of tensions (contradictions, limits, and dilemmas) running throughout the institutional arrangement of the BPs. In this way, the BPs are founded on a radical contradiction between the destabilising rationale of their autonomous politics and the stabilising rationale of the state interventions (policies). This interplay reveals the limits of liberal stateness for recognising experiences that challenge the public versus private dichotomy, such as is the case of the BPs. However, on the other hand, the autonomous politics of the commons cannot be contained within state categories if its destabilising rationality aims to persist. Otherwise, it ends up assimilated —stabilised within the state.

The experience of the BPs, with a twenty-year trajectory and a considerable territorial scope in the city and the province of Buenos Aires, provides key insights into the empirical challenges of building educational commons. Rather than focusing on the more pedagogical dimensions of the BPs, this article has focused on the strategic trajectory of the BPs before the state, resulting from their concrete social struggle. The main lesson is the inescapable role of the state in the field of education. Education systems are a substantial part of modern liberal stateness (Green 2013; Ramírez and Boli 1987). Their introduction and global expansion enclosed a massive domain of state-controlled accreditation of knowledge and the processes by which young people socialise, wiping away other means of socialisation developed by communities. Although the BPs were created as autonomous initiatives from the state, the issue of the state soon emerged as a dilemma as their students expressed their need for a secondary diploma. From here on, the BPs trajectory is a narrative of challenging liberal statehood in the terrain of education. The second lesson is the unstable character of their interrelation with the state. Since the destabilising rationale defines the utopian character of the commons, they cannot find a full stabilisation within the frame of the state. In this sense, the study of such experiences requires consideration of their tensions, as they are a sign of their continuing disruptive and emancipatory character.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of EduCommon Project, that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no [10127465].

Notes on contributors

Noelia Fernández González

Noelia Fernández González Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Pedagogy, Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain), and visiting researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture, Education and Society at the National University of San Martín (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Her current research, EduCommon (funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101027465), addresses Popular Education Projects in Buenos Aires, focusing on the relationship between the state and social movements. Her previous research explored the introduction of neoliberal governmentality in public education systems. Noelia specializes in qualitative methods and discourse analysis for the study of educational policies from the perspective of the critical sociology of educational policies.

Notes

1. Although 2001 was a year of protests spearheaded by the picket movement and other sectors that had been suffering the consequences of the structural adjustments of the previous years, December 19 and 20, were the two main days of the social uprising, with the mobilisation of the middle classes following the decree of what became known as the monetary and banking restrictions referred to as the ‘corralito’, which made them lose their savings (Rubinsztain 2012; Svampa 2008).

2. The interviews were carried out by the author of this article between April and June 2023. The elaboration and analysis of the interviews have met the required ethical research protocols. The participants gave their written informed consent to participate and, prior to elaborating the interviews, this study received a positive report from the University Research Ethics Committee of the Autonomous University of Madrid. Along the text, the names of some participants have been replaced with pseudonyms to protect their confidentiality, as they preferred to keep their data confidential. These pseudonyms are identified with an asterisk (*). Other participants chose to participate in this research by consenting to include their identities.

3. Spanish abbreviation of ‘bachilleratos populares’.