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Starting from the two correct positions that, compared to the form of capitalism that preceded it, neoliberal capitalism has generally been more harmful to working people, and that in it finance plays a greater role in both scale and scope, some political economists argue that in neoliberalism financial capital is parasitic on nonfinancial (or "productive," or "industrial") capital. The central argument of this article is that, to the contrary, financial capital serves all capital through the various ways that it allows for neoliberalism to increase its appropriation of surplus value. To concretely support this position, the article considers a particular financial relation, debt, and indicates seven specific ways debt expansion facilitates neoliberalism's pursuit of increased appropriation of surplus value. Secondarily, this article rejects any stated or implied policy implications from the parasitic financial capital thesis that present "productive capitalism" as the desirable alternative to the deleterious effects of financialized capitalism. JEL Classification : G00, G51, H63 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the rate of profit to address the issue of structural changes in class relationships and the process of capital accumulation that occurred under neoliberalism. I take a long-term class perspective and show that changing class relationships along with the financialization of the economy beginning in early 1980s progressively set the stage for the crisis of 2007-2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]