The second part, the lessons learned from the New Communist Movement (NCM), represents the consensus post-LOM cadre view on politics, organization, and ideology. These views are presented in the form of "lessons" Max learned in his analysis of the failures of the New Communist Movement. These lessons happen to be identical to the views that the LOM circle held before Max began work on the book. I did not like this part of the book because I disagree with the analysis.

Oddly, the lessons for the movement, presented at the end of the book, undercut the avowed central thesis of the book-a critique of the "good 1960s/bad 1960s" thesis that Revolution in the Air overtly attacks but ends up reinforcing! Max's final summation, in the form of his final advice to today's activists, is that the New Communist Movement was in fact fatally dogmatic, intolerant, etc. Here in Max's own words, is his final condemnation of the bad 1960s NCM, as it appears on the last page of his book, "But they became mired in dogmatist orthodoxy and moralistic intolerance, reproducing the worst traits of their predecessors instead of their strengths. They ended up making party building a fetish and constructed only sects." P. 338.

The reason, I think, for the disconnect between Max's intention of criticizing the good/bad 1960s line, but his failure to consistently do so, is the essentially social democratic line on working class organization that Max shares with Todd Gitlin and other non-Marxist critics of the NCM. Max (and the ex-LOM) believes that it is "premature" to attempt to build Leninist parties when there is no radical mass working class movement that can serve as a corrective to the sterile ideological insularity of a self proclaimed vanguard party. This is a huge problem in a backward superpower like the USA. But what is the value, for today's activists, of the existing body of ML literature from the last century? Very little value in Max's view. The repeated criticism of dogmatism, and, especially, Max's use of the straw man of Stalin's "Marxism and the National Question", to dismiss essentially all of Lenin's contributions to the theory of nations under imperialism, plays to the anti-intellectualism and the anarchist and anti-working class prejudices of many of today's young activists.

A final criticism of Max's book about the failure of the left is that it dodges the central issue surrounding the collapse of our movement. Gorbachev's reforms led to the unraveling of Soviet Communism and shattered the American left too. Revolution in the Air is silent on whether the reforms were a good thing or a bad thing. The book mentions that they happened, that LOM supported Gorbachev, but that is all.

It's disappointing that Revolution in the Air does not provide an opinion about the fall of Russian Marxism. This is the seminal event in the decline of Communism. For the soft left milieu of the ex LOM cadres, ex-CPUSA people like the CoC, and some others, the issue of the collapse of Communism, and especially the role Gorbachev played, remains, ten years after the event, a serious and unresolved ideological issue!

The final sections of the book, and especially the tendentious and, I think, incorrect "lessons" mar the really interesting early chapters on New Left history. Despite the flaws, this is a must read book. There is no other history of the period that is done as carefully, as fairly, and as well as this one.