This review appears in the Fall 2002 issue of Dynamic Magazine, published quarterly by the Young Communist League U.S.A.

Learning from Movements of the Past

By Miles Rodriguez

"A 1968 opinion poll revealed that more college students identified with Che Guevara (20%) than with any of the 1968 presidential candidates" and in 1970, "the New York Times reported that four out of ten college students - nearly three million people" - thought a revolution was necessary in the US."

These quotes are taken from Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, a new book by Max Elbaum, published by Verso Books, capturing the revolutionary mood of the 1968 generation of youth and students. The book is an excellent, fast-paced account of the events that lead to the radicalization of millions of youth and students of all backgrounds and their turn to what the author calls a "Third World Marxism," based on support for the Cuban, Vietnamese and Chinese Revolutions.

Revolution in the Air travels back to the beginnings of the radicalization of youth and students in the early 1960s. This awakening led to a new level of revolutionary fervor, leading to the founding of new revolutionary organizations in the 1970s.

This book is full of fascinating information about all of the variations of radical tendencies from 1960 to the present, with a focus on the people of color movements and their turn to Marxism-Leninism. Elbaum attempts to open our eyes to the radicalizing events of the period. We find schematic histories of the Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian movements and their process of change to a more revolutionary perspective. We also get a painful glimpse into the descent into the ultra-left and sectarian philosophies, leading to the dissolution of nearly all the "New communist Parties" during the 1980s.

Revolution in the Air reveals a lot of information that many of us have forgotten. This includes the rampant use of open state violence, taking the form of the police murders of protesters after Nixon’s 1970 of Cambodia. In the years between 1967-1969, we see how the assassinations of Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, as well as the bloody uprising in Detroit and two of the largest protests in US history (the anti-Vietnam War protests in 1969) galvanized the search for new revolutionary alternatives.

The coverage of the "New Communists" is dense and ponderously recounts the series of fights between these new groups as they became more sectarian. We witness their failure to unite, their devastating internal splits, and their development in the 1980s into largely irrelevant ultra-left tendencies. This would appear to be a problem less with the book and more with the subject matter. Unfortunately, the book largely ignores the CPUSA’s role in the movement, and fails to recognize that many of these "New Communist" groups were organized as an opposition to the Communist Party.

The positive side is a helpful international-historical context as an explanation for the far-left "super-revolutionary" form that some of these groups finally took and even some of their subsequent turn to right-wing policies. Elbaum explains that this strange reversal was caused by several groups’ direct adoption of Maoism and parroting of China’s foreign policy.

The author was an organizer for one of the more influential "New Communist" organizations, Line of March, and is able to balance an insider’s perspective with a desire to understand the movement historically.

Elbaum leaves us with hope for the future of the Left. His book is an encouragement to organize and unite, while using history to learn from the mistakes and successes of the past.

Miles Rodriguez is a member of the Rice University YCL and a member of the YCL National Council.