The book begins with a provocative question: why had the post-WWII explosion in the number of social scientists, and amount of social research, failed to provide fresh insights into the way society functions? In a way that we can easily recognize in 2025, 1960s social scientists were assuring Americans that everything was fine, great even, despite economic stagnation, growing inequality, and massive resource waste. The army of social scientists had analyzed the endless tiny parts of society, but lacked a comprehensive view of the social whole. Enter Marxism, which has always studied the social whole. However, this analysis of the social whole had not been extended from the era of competitive capitalism, to that of monopoly capitalism. 

B+S make clear that Monopoly Capital is not the same type of comprehensive analysis as Marx began in Capital. Instead, it gives a useful but necessary abstraction (as all good economic theory does) to uncover the dynamics of a capitalist system dominated by monopolies rather than competitive entities. At the heart of this goal is their analysis of “the generation and absorption of [economic] surplus under the conditions of monopoly capitalism.” 

Even as socialists, we recognize capitalism’s revolutionary productive capabilities. However, we critique this ability, not worship it, recognizing both the good and bad elements of capitalist production. We strive to increase the former (food, medicine, housing) and decrease the latter (exploitation, garbage, pollution). As the winners of the competitive stage of capitalism became monopolies, they became heirs to a massive economic surplus, from several hundred years of capitalist theft, accumulation, and production. This book is about monopoly capitalism's ability to  grow, maintain, and use that surplus. 

So just what is surplus? “The economic surplus… is the difference between what a society produces and the costs of producing it. The size of the surplus is an index of productivity and wealth, of how much freedom a society has to accomplish whatever goals it may set for itself. The composition of the surplus shows how it uses that freedom: how much it invests in expanding its productive capacity; how much it consumes in various forms; how much it wastes and in what ways.” 

While there is no exact data on the total surplus, B+S use it as a conceptual category, backed by thorough economic data. Additionally, they use the United States as their model, as Marx used Great Britain, because it was the most developed capitalist economy at their time of writing. 

Necessary for understanding monopoly capitalism is an understanding of the ‘typical unit of Big Business:’ the giant corporation. These corporations are defined as such: 1) control rests in the hands of the board of directors and chief executive officers; 2) management is a self-perpetuating group with little real responsibility to the shareholders; 3) each corporation aims at and normally achieves financial independence through the internal generation of funds. 

B+S trace the history of capitalism from that of great tycoons and individual fortunes (like John D. Rockefeller) to that of great corporations. In this, we can see how the historical development of competitive capitalism’s ‘class-in-itself,’ with individual tycoons ruthlessly competing, matured into monopoly capital’s ‘class-for-itself,’ in relatively stable, increasingly coordinated, giant corporations. This is the development of capitalist class consciousness. As we will see, the winners of competitive capitalism embraced a more sustainable type of competition, to hold back capitalism’s contradictions. 

As corporations had become social institutions, B+S note many claims that corporations had overcome their old mission of maximizing profit. A typical claim was that greed had been supplanted in the ‘soulful corporation,’ with grander, more altruistic purposes. Reiterated to the present, this claim has never been true. The giant corporation remains a bloody, technocratic ecosystem, where competency and connivance are equal parts of the job description. The world’s working and labouring classes live and die by the external effects of the giant corporation’s internal tectonic shifts.