Financialization from a Marxist Perspective

Within the framework of Marxist political economy, financialization is understood through the prisms of logical, theoretical, and historical perspectives. It is defined in terms of the increasing presence of interest bearing capital, as distinct from credit as such, the role this plays in real as opposed to fictitious accumulation of capital, and how this has underpinned the period of neoliberalism, including the global crisis. Financialization is seen as the expansion of interest bearing capital in intensive and extensive forms. The first is notable in terms of the growth and proliferation of financial assets themselves with increasingly distant attachments to production and exchange of commodities themselves, and the second involves the extension of interest bearing capital to new areas of economic and social life in hybrid forms with other types of capital. An appendix draws out the differences between the approach taken herein and the approach on financialization taken by Costas Lapavitsas.