The exchange of equivalents (quid pro quo or ‘something for something’) is the theoretical foundation of the capitalist market, even if it has never been practiced universally like capitalists claim. While this form of exchange has enabled some of capitalism’s progressive trends (development of the productive forces), it reached a point where it was surpassed by both the productive forces and relations of production. From then on, this supposed market 'rationality' was hampered by the state change to monopoly capitalism. 

The giant corporation takes so much economic activity away from the market, and within its enormous operations. These corporations, as components of the system, are increasingly rationalized, but at the expense of the overall system’s rationality. With commodities priced not at their cost of production, but to maximize profit, the monopoly market mechanism promotes scarcity rather than abundance. Resources, factories, and labour lay idle, because there is no profitable exchange to be had, despite rampant poverty in the imperial core and overexploited neocolonial world. 

What results is an irrational system made so by clinging to the supposed rationality of its exchange mechanism. Strict cost and resource accounting methods exist alongside impossible accumulations of waste. Rationality is asserted increasingly in all fields of society, yet 'rational actors' pass silently over the irrationality of the capitalist system as a whole. 

Powerless to overcome this core contradiction, bourgeois society turns its ‘science’ into dogma and fetish, repeating slogans until whatever kernel of truth they once possessed is long gone. “Free enterprise” is the possibility that anyone could start a successful business. While this was never really true, and only gets more false each year, it does delineate a progressive difference between capitalism and the preceding feudal commercial paradigm. 

The same goes for ‘democracy.’ Political rights exist in theory, but true democratic control of the society and economy are easily hindered by the oligarchy, particularly through official political channels. In these and countless other ways, ‘rational’ bourgeois ideology lost its ability to earnestly seek and express order from chaos. It instead became a psychological toolkit for powerful monopolistic interests to implement their oligarchic designs. The contradiction between society’s increasingly rationalized means of production, and the irrationality of the  organizations built up to servce this economic base, shows the true exhaustion of capitalism’s historic progressive potential.

B+S note Adam Smith’s notion of the division of labour as enabling the productive explosion inherent in early capitalism. They balance this against Marx’s notion of what mass desolation would occur for the majority, from spreading the specialization (and hierarchization) that took root in the economic base across the entire society. What both Smith and Marx respectively failed to see was the extended possibilities of capitalism to immiserate more than it enriched (Smith), and continue to rationalize production long beyond competitive capitalism (Marx). In the time of monopoly capitalism, we see productive forces capable of the world Smith and Marx both imagined for human thriving, but societies seemingly farther than ever from this goal. We have seen, in the preceding chapters, the economic, social, and political impacts of this intractable problem.  

Lacking the social and personal purpose both envisioned and occasionally achieved through labour under socialism, a job becomes nothing more than a paycheck. Since the paycheck becomes the worker’s only link to ‘whatever gratifications are allowed to working people in this society,’ the worker’s self-identification erodes into that of the consumer. Consumption becomes an extension of the pressure felt at the office or shop, the only method through which meaning can be squeezed from the alienating monopoly capitalist system. A similar transformation occurs for leisure; deadened and drained from work, the freedom to do whatever you want becomes the freedom to do nothing. Relaxation becomes nothing but work's shadow, where you’re given a break from being forced to do whatever your boss wants. In this way ‘entertainment’ or ‘killing time’ becomes the sole function of leisure. 

The cultural products on offer are brought down to a level that require little if any real intellectual engagement. Conversation, emotional and connective, is reduced to chatter and small talk. In this way, the same meaningless boredom that plagues work follows the worker home, infecting their leisure time just as deeply. Workers fight for more free time, then waste it, unsure of what to do until work commences once more. The productive and creative capacity of every human being is thus sacrificed to protect the oppressive irrationality central to the monopoly capitalist system. 

The specialization and rationalization of the irrational economy’s component parts forefront calculation, an alignment with market or social expectations. Our reactions become ways of smoothing over the disconnection and emotional lack in our lives. Pretense, in our appreciation of art, our interactions, and our relationships, replaces real, raw, spontaneous emotion. We are able to function in this way through repression, acknowledgement of this theatre as ‘human nature’ and alignment with the spiritual ‘law and order’ of monopoly capitalism. 

Capitalism has removed the pressures of scarcity (at least for many in 1960s America), but the enforced moral code that came with past economic scarcity has disappeared with it. Lacking the capacity to create and enforce a new moral code of its own, monopoly capitalist society turns to physical repression, and state violence. People wall themselves into their homes instead of using public spaces, where they might encounter those for whom scarcity remains as real as ever. With all this repressed psychic energy blocked from creative and productive outlets, it gets funneled (often through the sales effort) towards sex. No longer forbidden or taboo, sex is much more ‘free’ than it’s ever been, but the same meaninglessness plagues our experience of it. Yet satisfaction with sexual experience remains low, despite the spiking demand and availability of sex. Emotional and physical needs unmet, those who can afford divorce or cultural hobbies direct this latent energy into affairs and passions; those who can’t afford it simmer in hostile silence. 

Most unfortunately, it is into this sterile and rigid world that children are born, reared, and inevitably socialized, to repeat all the same sublimations and suffering of their parents. Having so thoroughly analyzed the insurmountable economic roots of this social malaise, B+S make the prescient (from our present vantage point) assumption that the decay will only stop, once monopoly capitalism is overthrown by socialism.