ABSTRACT
Social movements stand at the heart of scholarship on the 1960s, but so too do the wars associated with them—Cold, traditional, and national liberation. Much less attention has been paid to the economy, which has received so much political and scholarly attention since the 1970s. To be sure, during the 1960s capitalism was hardly ignored, and anti-capitalism was on the agenda, but more often as a slogan and a sentiment, encapsulating a desire for far-reaching, ill-defined change, than as a fully articulated program. Alternatives to capitalism would, it was hoped, develop after political power changed hands, wars of liberation were won, and imperialism was defeated. European and American Sixties activists criticized American-style consumerism (even as they enjoyed Coca-Cola and American music), but they seldom grappled seriously with the thorny issues of restructuring production, reducing worker exploitation and alienation, and altering the hierarchies of economic and political power of the Bretton Woods financial system. Dependencies and obstacles to development proliferated across the Global South, but Third World critics focused more on political solutions to these problems than economic ones.
