Revolution in the Air is the first in-depth study of the long march of the US New Left after 1968. It tells the story of the “new communist movement,” which was the most racially integrated and fast-growing movement on the Left. Thousands of young 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. These admirers of Mao, Che and Amilcar Cabral organized resistance to the republican majorities of Nixon and Ford. By the 1980s these groups had either collapsed or become tiny shards of the dream of a Maoist world revolution.

Taking issue with the idea of a division between an early ‘good sixties’ and a later ‘bad sixties,’ Max Elbaum 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.

“Max Elbaum has given us an incisive and critical history of the Other New Left the radicals who brought class struggle and Third World liberation to the forefront, looked to the world for allies, and tried their best to work through the dynamics of race and class. If you still believe sixties radicalism was nothing more than youthful middle-class confusion or parochial identity politics, then open these pages and dig.” — Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Max Elbaum was a member of Students for a Democratic Society and a leader of one of the main new communist movement organizations. His writings have appeared in the Nation, the US Guardian, CrossRoads, and the Encyclopedia of the American Left.		 Publication
Cloth: March 2002
Paper: October 2006

384 pages

Cloth
1 85984 617 3
£20 / US$30 / CAN$44

Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 563 0
£12.99 / US$23 / CAN$30