NCM activists led many of the most important student struggles of the '70s. Here Kent State University students and supporters celebrate breaking through fences and police lines to occupy the land where the university planned a gymnasium to obliterate the site of the 1970 massacre of four students by the Ohio National Guard.

The past few years has seen the emergence of a new generation of radical activists. After an initial upsurge represented by the anti-WTO actions in Seattle, many have begun to ask themselves hard but important questions about what it means to fight capitalism and to make revolution. Questions like: What tactics and strategies actually work? How can we build effective unity, especially across lines of nationality? How do we respond effectively to state repression while remaining a democratic movement? And what are the most appropriate forms of organization for accomplishing all these things?

Those who are quick to offer simple answers to these questions are usually unaware of the history of previous efforts to answer them. In the late 1960s the civil rights movement and the movement against the war in Vietnam radicalized millions of young people of all colors, leading many to become conscious revolutionaries who sought to grapple with the same sorts of questions now confronting the more radical wing of the global justice movement. Revolutionary-minded young activists looked many places in their search for a coherent theory or ideology to answer these questions. Many white radicals embraced varieties of anarchism and Trotskyism. Many activists of color turned towards forms of revolutionary nationalism. Many women took up radical feminism. But the trend that captured the allegiances of the largest section revolutionary minded young activists was what was broadly called Third World Marxism.

In his new book, Revolution in the Air, Max Elbaum describes the process:

Between 1968 and 1973 layer after layer of young people went in search of an ideological framework and strategy to bring that revolution about. Inspired by the dynamic liberation movements that threatened to besiege Washington with "two, three, many Vietnams," many decided that a Third World-oriented version of Marxism… was key to building a powerful left in the U.S., within the "belly of the beast."

Elbaum continues with an explanation of Third World Marxism's appeal:

Third World Marxism put opposition to racism and military intervention at the heart of its theory and practice… It linked aspiring U.S. revolutionaries to the parties and leaders who were proving that "the power of the people is greater than the man's technology": the Vietnamese and Chinese Communist parties; Amilcar Cabral and the Marxist-led liberation movements in Africa; Che, Fidel and the Cuban Revolution… Third World Marxism… promised a break with Eurocentric models of social change, and also with the political caution that characterized Old Left groups, communist and social democratic alike. It pointed the way toward building a multiracial movement out of a badly segregated U.S. left.

I recently finished reading Revolution in the Air in a study group made up mainly of young activists of color in and around the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM) at Hunter College. While we disagreed on many things, everybody in the study group was agreed that this is a very important book for young activists to be reading. As it turned out, several similar study groups have also been pulled together to read the book in other cities. It's not hard to see why. Revolution in the Air is the story of how large numbers of radicalized young people in the United States came to embrace the distinctive Marxism represented by revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America and then attempted to build serious multi-racial revolutionary organizations based on those politics.

Elbaum describes how Third World Marxism inspired the creation first of local collectives and then of national organizations that identified themselves as part of a common "New Communist Movement" that they hoped would quickly cohere into a large and serious revolutionary party. (Instead it resulted in a dizzying alphabet soup of collectives, parties and "pre-party formations"—the RCP, CPML, CWP, BWC, LRS, LOM, RWHq, PUL, and many more.) Revolution in the Air describes the ambitious organizing work of these groups and how they were ultimately tripped up by a rising tide of dogmatism and sectarianism that overwhelmed the initial spirit of their projects.

A Different View of the New Left

Revolution in the Air challenges what Elbaum calls the "good '60s/bad '60s" view of history that condemns the turn towards revolutionary politics and the attempt to build serious disciplined organizations as a betrayal of the values of participatory democracy that animated the movement in its earlier years. Revolution argues persuasively that the turn towards Third World Marxism was a maturation of the movement in the face of real developments in the world. Experience had taught a generation of idealistic activists that the US was an imperialist power and that attempts to reform it could not change its worst features. Experience had also taught them that the loose organizational style that prevailed through the '60s was very vulnerable to repression and disruption. Tighter forms of organization went hand in hand with the commitment to actually making revolution.

Third World Marxism exercised a particularly strong pull on radical activists of color. Black, Puerto Rican, Chicano and Asian activists came to understand the struggles of their own communities against racism as part of a worldwide struggle of colonized peoples against imperialism. This was a profoundly liberating realization. People of color no longer needed to view themselves as minorities fighting for recognition in a white-majority country. Rather they were part of the global majority fighting against the global domination of a besieged white minority. Third World Marxism upheld the struggles of each group while promoting unity and solidarity between them as well as with white progressives.

After decades building people's movements and revolutionary socialist organization, Max Elbaum spent the '90s making a different contribution—a historical study designed to be useful to activists.

It is tempting to dismiss the New Communist Movement for its considerable failings. The movement became progressively more doctrinaire and sectarian as the '70s progressed and its influence shrank. It was characterized by a high degree of machismo and, with some important exceptions, a particularly backwards attitude towards the newly emergent gay and lesbian liberation movement. Attempts to follow the twists and turns of the foreign policy of the Chinese Communist Party led many groups to increasingly bizarre and indefensible positions. Elbaum is unsentimental in his criticism of these failings. But he is also appreciative of the movement's considerable accomplishments.

Thousands of young people, largely from middle-class backgrounds, immersed themselves in the life of the working class by taking jobs in factories and moving into working class communities. They dedicated themselves to organizing for revolution, often sacrificing their own health and well being and risking beatings and arrests in order to build serious organizations of oppressed people, organizations that could really fight. More than any other trend coming out of the '60s, the New Communist Movement sought to build and sometimes succeeded in building genuinely multi-racial organizations.

The young revolutionaries viewed the upheavals of the '60s as a dress rehearsal for an even greater social conflict that they hoped might offer the chance to really make a revolution, but only if a serious and disciplined revolutionary organization able to mobilize all sectors were in place. With the benefit of hindsight it seems easy to see where they miscalculated. As the country moved to the right in the late '70s the New Communist Movement remained convinced that big upheavals were just waiting to explode. When they didn't, the movement found itself isolated from the more moderate struggles that actually were taking place. But it is to Elbaum's considerable credit that he is able to recapture the mood and events that led so many to think that revolution really might be around the corner.

Drawing Lessons from the NCM

In the concluding chapter of the book, Elbaum offers what he considers to be the lessons of the New Communist Movement. In addition to warning against the dangers of dogmatism and sectarianism, he identifies several positive lessons as well. These include the importance of having an analysis of the role of US imperialism in the world, the strategic centrality of the fight against racism in the US, and the importance of developing trained organizers and disciplined organizations able to actually carry out the work of building a revolutionary movement. These are lessons from which most of the global justice movement could still really benefit.

Elbaum's book sparked some lively debates in our study group. One young Black woman wondered whether Marxism was too Eurocentric a foundation for revolutionary organizing among people of color. A Latina replied that perhaps our outlook was shaped as much by living in the US as by being people of color and that, at least in Latin America, Marxism was an organic part of the political culture. At various points people took issue with aspects of Elbaum's analysis—his views on nationalism, or the Soviet Union, or Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns. But of far greater interest to the study group than the ins and outs of the various debates that divided the New Communist Movement, was the fact that it had existed at all—that thousands of young activists like ourselves, inspired by revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, had set out to build organizations dedicated to making revolutionary change in the US. More than any other lesson offered by the book, this is the one that stood out: organizing for revolution is possible.

Those who want to build a serious revolutionary movement in the United States today cannot afford to ignore this book. Only a fool would want to mechanically copy the experiences of the New Communist Movement in the 1970s. But only a bigger fool would imagine that there are not important lessons to be learned from carefully studying those experiences. Elbaum relates those experiences, from the appearance of the first Third World Marxist collectives in the late '60s to the last gasps of most of the remaining organizations in the '80s and '90s, and does so in a manner that is neither sentimental nor sectarian. His book is the definitive account of an important chapter in the recent history of American radicalism that until now has been ignored or forgotten.

Christopher Day is the director of the Student Resource Center at Hunter College in the City University of New York.