Building schools and futures with utopian social movements in Buenos Aires

In December 2001, after more than a decade of neoliberal governance, Argentina was in a severe political, economic and social crisis. The extreme levels of poverty and unemployment led some desperately frustrated Argentines to organize themselves into “movements of unemployed workers” (MTDs) while others “recovered” their former workplaces. Buenos Aires has continued to be the site of intense theorizing, debate, and experimentation in forms of radical democracy that are fundamentally utopian in origin. These movements are “utopian” in the sense that they bring their radical vision of the future into the present through attempted immediate transformation of both material conditions and social relationships. The key aspects of this utopian future/present are consensus-based decision making and leaderless institutional structures. This paper examines the experience of one such experiment, an MTD-run adult education program known as a bachillerato popular (people’s high school). The school—part of a larger trend among MTDs—is run collectively by teachers and students working together to construct popular, socially-conscious education that is more responsive to the needs of the community it serves. This paper draws on 11 months of participant observation and interviews to examine how the school’s utopian goals are defined and practiced on the ground. I use my vantage point as a teacher-militante in the school to analyze how this particular bachillerato popular re-invents educational and political practices. The bachillerato popular demonstrates the potential for utopian social change projects to not only imagine but create alternative futures, as well as some of their limitations.