Young People's Socialist League

Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air traces the history of the New Communist Movement (NCM) that grew out of the 1960s antiwar and antiracism movements in the United States. Embracing Marxism-Leninism but skeptical of the Soviet Union, NCM activists gravitated toward "Third World Marxism" as represented by the Cultural Revolution in China, the Cuban and Vietnamese Communist Parties, and several other national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Arguably the most dynamic and racially integrated sector of the left in the late '60s and early '70s, the NCM had all but disappeared by the 1990s.

The NCM is an aspect of '60s radicalism that is often overshadowed by SDS/Weatherman, and I found Elbaum's work interesting -- even engrossing -- from historical and "leftist trainspotting" perspectives. I appreciated two chapters in particular. The first full chapter of the book does an excellent job setting the scene, explaining what attracted NCM activists to Marxism-Leninism, in particular its "Third World" forms. As someone who came of age well after these ideologies had lost much of whatever credibility or appeal they may once have had, this discussion helped me understand how such politics didn't seem as crazy back then as they do today.

I was also especially intrigued by Elbaum's chapter on the culture of the movement, titled "Bodies on the Line", and would have liked to see more about life in the NCM in other parts of the book. With so much of the discussion about the actual "rank-and-file" participants in the NCM confined to a single chapter, the rest of Revolution in the Air can sometime be overwhelmed with the expected alphabet soup of organizations, and chronicles of splits, squabbles, and ideological bickering.

One of Elbaum's goals in this work is to refute what he calls the "good sixties/bad sixties" paradigm, which contrasts the idealistic early-sixties activism of SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement with more violent radicalism later on, especially that of the Weather Underground. While Elbaum effectively challenges this notion, I was amused to see a similar "good NCM/bad NCM" dynamic in his own presentation. He separates the period 1968-1973 from later years, arguing that the NCM's "pre-party formations" of the late '60s and early '70s allowed creative, dynamic, and flexible activity and debate about tactics, strategies, and the future Marxist-Leninist vanguard party.

Starting in the mid-seventies, however, one group after another actually founded competing vanguard parties, which took it as a central tenet that there could be only one true vanguard, "the correctness or incorrectness of [whose] ideological and political line decides everything" (Mao). As China abandoned the Cultural Revolution (the true nature of which could no longer be denied), turned toward capitalism, and attacked protesters in Tienanmen Square, and the Soviet Union itself disintegrated, the New Communist groups were locked into dogmatism and sectarianism, unable to cope with the crumbling of their ideological base. (Not surprisingly, the years 1968-1973 are the most thoroughly discussed, receiving as many pages as the following two decades.)

Elbaum wraps up with a chapter summarizing the lessons he wants young radicals to draw from the rise and fall of the NCM. I wasn't especially impressed by this conclusion, which largely recycles analysis and discussion from earlier in the book. Although Elbaum can't avoid identifying the NCM's "ideological frameworks" as central flaws, he still embraces Marxism-Leninism and "the vanguard-cadre model" of organization as the way forward for the left. I don't buy that, and find Revolution in the Air valuable primarily as a history of organizations and ideologies now in the dustbin.