Meticulously researched by Max Elbaum, University of Wisconsin student leader in the late sixties and an activist ever since, REVOLUTION IN THE AIR details the work of the self-identified "New Communist Movement." Through the mid-1970s this new current was the most dynamic and racially integrated trend on the US Left. Thousands of young Americans, radicalized by the Vietnam War and Black Power and spurred on by the Puerto Rican, Chicano and Asian American movements, embraced a Third World–oriented version of Marxism. For a decade, these admirers of Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh and African revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral organized resistance in factories and streets against the "new republican majority" of the Nixon and Ford years.

REVOLUTION IN THE AIR probes this experience, including the process through which the movement’s ardor to build a new revolutionary vanguard fell afoul of its own dogmatic paradigms. Painstakingly and self-critically, Max Elbaum describes the sectarian sins and failures of the partisans of Third World Marxism while refusing to obscure the resoluteness of their opposition to racism and imperial wars.

This fresh balance sheet of the late 1960s and 1970s Left is must reading for everyone concerned with the history of US radicalism. It is especially relevant for today’s new generation of activists who, like their sixties predecessors, are coming of age at a time when the Left lacks a mass base and is fragmented along racial lines, and when socialist theory, strategy and organizational models need a major overhaul.

Max Elbaum was a member of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s and a leader of one of the main New Communist Movement organizations during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s he was a founder and editor of the pathbreaking socialist-dialogue magazine CrossRoads. His writings have appeared in the Nation, the US Guardian, Radical History Review, and the Encyclopedia of the American Left.