Revolution in the Air Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che

“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.

Max Elbaum Verso
Printer friendly  
Verso

A New, Third Edition of Revolution in the Air rolled off the press April 10, 2018, with a Foreword by Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter.

“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 class confusion or parochial identity politics, then open these pages and dig.” –Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Truly a superb work of scholarship that raises all the right questions.” – Radical History

Revolution in the Air is the definitive study of how radicals from the sixties movements embraced twentieth-century Marxism, and what movements of dissent today can learn from the legacies of Lenin, Mao and Che.

This new paperback edition, released fifty years after the seminal Protests of 1968, features a foreword by Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. It is essential reading for those concerned with the radical history of the struggle for racial equality in the US- and how we can learn from that history to achieve a just future. 

“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

“The breadth of Elbaum’s knowledge … marks this book as an absolutely first-rate work of political scholarship.”

– Village Voice

If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary.

(One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.)

“It should be required reading for those interested in the modern history of social movements and for radicals of my generation who are trying to find out what went wrong.”

– Los Angeles Times

Book events are scheduled so far in Oakland (April 21), Berkeley (April 26), Washington DC (May 7), New York (May 10), Sacramento (May 20) and Chicago (June 12). Others will be added over the coming months. For current information and updates, go to:

http://revolutionintheair.org/new-edition-events/

Today revolutionary sentiments are spreading once again as we face exceptional dangers from the white nationalist-driven Trump presidency. I look forward to working with all of you as we do our best to defeat the racist, sexist and authoritarian right; strengthen mass movements for peace, social justice and a sustainable environment; and make revolutionary politics not just a sentiment filling the air but a powerful political force on the ground.

Max Elbaum

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. He lives in Oakland.