Free universities are diverse but loosely networked projects that resist repressive capitalist and state configurations of power by re-imagining teaching, learning and research on their own terms, often through radical and ongoing experimentation. Drawing from my own experiences as a co-founder and organiser of the Brisbane Free University, along with research I conducted with around twenty-five different free universities across the U.S.A., Canada and Mexico, I focus in this article on activists' attempts to develop emancipatory countercapitalist pedagogies. Using Harney and Moten's (2013) notion of the tension between "study" and "education", with the former connoting a vast realm of possibilities for learning and the latter pointing to the presence of predefined end-points, I ask: when does activists' prefigurative work orbit around explicitly countercapitalist end-points to learning (against capitalism), and when do they attempt to abandon endpoints altogether, in favour of "radically open" forms of "learning for its own sake" (beyond capitalism)?