"The major capitalist countries faced a stark choice: deepen socialistic reform, public ownership and initiative, and invest in the still growing Third World to expand demand so as to keep growth going or, as the neoliberals in their think tanks bankrolled by capital and some politicians already converted to the new creed recommended, lift postwar restrictions on capital, now blamed for the growth slowdown, at home and campaign to lift them abroad. The former favoured working people the world over while the latter favoured capital and its comprador allies in the Third World. Capital won. Though union density and the political strength of the historic parties of labour and the left were at historic highs, the left was intellectually too weak to present viable alternatives. Over the post-war decades, non-Communist working class parties and organisations in the major capitalist countries ‘had no economic policy of their own’ and had focused only on ‘improving the condi- tions of their working-class constituencies’ through reliance ‘on a strong wealth- creating capitalist economy to finance their aims’ (Hobsbawm 1994, 272)."