Uwspólnianie w okupacjach uniwersyteckich i rekompozycja studenta-pracownika

Article examines the relationship between the commons, student subjectivity, and the university through the lens of a recent cycle of student occupations in Poland (2023–2025). Drawing on a materialist understanding of the commons as a social relation and process of commoning – rather than merely a resource or property regime – it argues that universities remain key sites where the tension between capitalist subsumption and the collective production of knowledge becomes visible. In the context of Poland’s peripheral academic capitalism, shaped by low public funding, massification, and the increasing dependence of students on wage labour, a new figure of subjectivity has emerged: the student–worker. The article analyses how a series of occupations of university spaces temporarily disrupted the rhythms of capitalist circulation within higher education. Through practices of occupation, students collectively reclaimed time, space, and infrastructures of everyday life, transforming them into sites of commoning. These practices involved forms of democratic self-governance, shared living and learning, political organising, and the collective production of knowledge through processes of co-research. Based on documents, interviews conducted during the occupations, and materials produced by the movement itself, the article shows how these struggles contributed to the recomposition of student subjectivity. Although the occupations did not secure lasting institutional victories, they expanded the sphere of the commons by generating shared knowledge, political tools, collective memory, and new forms of antagonistic organisation. The analysis suggests that universities – despite their deep integration into capitalist relations – remain spaces where encounters between student subjectivity and the commons can open possibilities for political mobilisation and for imagining alternative forms of higher education grounded in collective self-governance and common ownership.