I’m traveling this week in France for a couple book talks, and also co-organizing a workshop where a bunch of scholars critically examine how school finance works across the world. It’s been fascinating.

This week, I’m passing along a tiktok video I made about the case of Marseille, France, a diverse working class city which has faced what appears to be the brunt of French racial capitalism over the neoliberal period.

Specifically, I’m interested in how they’ve financed an initiative to rebuild the city’s school buildings through a network of flows, notable for the recentralizing position of the national government after neoliberal decentralization. I’m most interested in the role of the European Investment Bank, which provided 650 million euros in loans to the Marsellies municipality.

Thanks for Virginie Baby-Collin and Aude-Line Gervais at the University of Aixe-Marseille for their research on the initiative, from whom I learned all this during the workshop (we also heard case studies from Lebanon, Morocco, Brazil, Chile, the Phillipines, and the US).

The case of Marseille gets to a philosophical question I’ve been percolating: is debt ontologically necessary for capital outlays like school infrastructure? Does some entity—whether federal, regional, local, national, whatever—need to take out a loan to be able to build school infrastructure? Must governments borrow to build their schools?

On the one hand, you’d think that governments could send grants on a pay as you go basis, but on the other hand, it could be that resource-intensive collective goods like school infrastructure require capital lent up front with the promise it’ll be paid back. I don’t know.

The case of Marseille is a really interesting one to think with, in the sense that the EIB is similar to the national investment authority proposals in the US, which the municipal bond market and its hangers-on have killed over and over again.