School Finance Regimes
In my years of studying school finance as a socialist, I’ve had a lingering question: how do other countries do it, exactly?
To answer that question, I’m starting a new project called School Finance Regimes. A french colleague and friend, geographer Nora Nafaa, and I won a grant from the French government to study school finance critically across national contexts. The goal of the project is to look at how other countries fund their schools and imagine radical policy horizons based on what we find.
One thing I’ve been doing to prepare is building a reading list on these themes: critical theory, international comparative education, education finance, etc. Here’s a provisional bibliography we’ve put together with readings we’re interested in. If you have any to suggest let me know! And if you study this sort of thing, please reach out: we’re still looking for potential contributors.
Also to prepare for this project, I wanted to get a sense of Louis Althusser’s thinking along these lines, imperialism specifically. I devoted a previous research project or rereading Althusser’s educational theory (which is the theory that I bring to bear on school finance in this newsletter), and I wanted to see what he had to say.
I remembered that GM Goshgarian, one of Althusser’s best English translators, sent me a copy of History and Imperialism, a collection of previously unpublished notes on these subjects. The lion’s share of the book is an unpublished manuscript called Book on Imperialism. So I dug into that and found some fascinating passages. This week I’m sending those passages along with some commentary on how they might apply to school finance regimes.
In an introductory passage, Althusser points to the metropolitan countries and their working classes, who foot the bill for empires, and plays with the local/global distinction:
…we have a natural tendency to identify imperialism with ‘colonial’ or ‘neo-colonialist’ conquest and aggression, with the pillaging and exploitation of the Third World. All that is indeed part of what imperialism has in its hunting bag. But are we aware that imperialism operates first and foremost in the metropolitan countries, at metropolitan workers’ expense? That imperialism is first and foremost a domestic (and global) matter before it is a matter of foreign interventions? (49)
So while we think of imperialism as colonial, perhaps its also domestic/local, and this is the kind of framing that might be helpful in thinking about school finance. To what extent do local expenditures (at the workers’ expense) figure into empire? Where’s the line of domestic/global exactly when it comes to empire?
In that same introduction, Althusser works with two famous quotes in Marxism. First is Engels’s dictum that history’s two options in times of crisis are “socialism or barbarism,” that Rose Luxembourg took up. Second is Lenin’s thesis that imperialism is the “culminating stage” of capitalism.
Althusser has an amazing riff on what barbarism can look like when an empire weakens and doesn’t go the socialism route, which I think names our moment really well:
What is barbarism? Regression while remaining in place, stagnation while remaining in place, of a kind of which human history offers examples by the hundreds. Yes, our ‘civilization’ can perish in place, not only without rising to a higher ‘stage’ of sinking to a lower stage that has already existed, but in accumulating all the suffering of a childbirth that will not end, of a stillbirth that is not a delivery. (50)
Near the end of Book on Imperialism, he has some other lines on this theme of perishing in place, like in one section called “Barbarism? Fascism was a preliminary form of it.” Extending his previous passage on Lenin’s “culminating stage” concept he writes:
This certainly means, beyond a doubt, that imperialism is the last stage of capitalism, but it also means something more, something extremely interesting: it means that imperialism is the ‘culminating’ point of capitalism, hence that ‘afterwards’ there can only be degeneration, if imperialism lasts…If we don’t move on to socialism, the stagnation will only intensify and the rot will spread. It may take frightful forms…(112)
So imperialism isn’t like a linear stage of capitalism. It’s not like non-imperial capitalism comes before imperial capitalism. Rather, imperial capitalism is the point when capitalism degrades, dies in place, perishes, can neither be renewed or reborn, degenerates into frightful forms.
Then there’s a term Althusser uses that I haven’t gotten out of my head since I read it. “Over-putrefaction”:
And we have every reason to believe that, even if we have to go through a certain period of the over-putrefaction [sur-pourissement] of imperialism (of which the steadily deepening crisis is the first warning sign), the working class’s struggle, if it is well conducted, will ultimately impose socialism and avoid ‘barbarism’. (113)
The more I read the news, the more I keep thinking about the over-putrefaction of American imperialism, its degradation, how our moment feels like some kind of culmination of imperialism, not in a linear/temporal sense, but rather in a tipping point sense: this is the point after which something else other than capitalist imperialism will exist. We’re seeing the frightful forms of a civilization perishing in place, stagnating as it chooses barbarism over socialism.
In American education I think we’re seeing plenty of frightful forms, for example, indicating a kind of perishing in place.
I like this concept of imperialism since I think it speaks to the contemporary moment pretty well, and I’d like to take it with me as I read more about school finance regimes across the world: what is the state of school finance internationally as we reach a kind of degraded culmination of capitalist imperialism?