The educational commons represent a radical alternative to capitalist education, which seeks to privatize schools, enclose knowledge production, and capture the surplus of convivial study. At the heart of struggles for the educational commons is a radical desire for other ways of being, thinking, learning, and living. In the threatening planetary context of ecological crisis, there is a tense relationship between need and desire: the commodified desires that capitalism generates are neither satisfying nor sustainable, yet it is unclear how a reduction of struggles for planetary commons will be successful if they are articulated strictly at the level of basic need. Drawing on the work of Agnes Heller, Herbert Marcuse, Dominic Pettman, and Noah De Lissovoy this paper seeks to mediate the tension between need and desire in Marxism and critical theory through an exploration of the utopian role Eros might play in the educational commons. Seeking a vision of ecologies of eros, the paper aims to develop a pedagogical vision for navigating the ecological dialectic of abundance and scarcity in struggles for the commons.
