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Revolution in the Air: From Malcolm and Martin to Lenin, Mao and Che

By (author) Max Elbaum

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Revolution in the Air is the first in-depth study of the long march of the US New Left after 1968. in the late 1960s thousands of young American activists, radicalized by the Vietnam War and Black Liberation and spurred on by the Puerto Rican, Chicano and Asian American movements, embraced a Third World-oriented version of Marxism. Their new Communist Movement was through the mid-1970s the most dynamic and racially integrated trend on the left as these admirers of Mao and Che organized resistance in the factories and streets against the rightward turn in US politics. But the movement's ardour to build a new revolutionary vanguard eventually fell foul of its own dogmatic paradigms. Yet it is crucial not to let the failures of the 1970s' Left obscure its strengths, especially the resoluteness of its opposition to racism at home and military intervention abroad. Max Elbaum challenges the dominant interpretation of the 1960s' movements, which portrays an early good sixties turning into a later bad sixties due to the malign influence of third World revolutionary movements and Leninist ideology. He is particularly concerned to reclaim the lessons of the New Communist Movement for today's activists who, like their sixties' predecessors, are coming of age at a time when the Left lacks mass support and is fragmented along racial lines, and when socialist theory and organizational models need a major overhaul.