Fifty years after 1968, Marxism-Leninism sounds as off-putting to most leftists as it did to everybody else back in the day.

For those of us active in that period (and the ‘70s and ‘80s in my case), the old buzzwords — “democratic centralism,” “proletarian internationalism” — really had cache. They don’t any longer, but some of our worst tendencies, a sectarianism that comes in all flavors and styles, are alive and well with us today.

To understand what we were thinking in those days, there’s no better guide than Max Elbaum’s 2002 history of post-SDS Marxist-Leninist cadre groups, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. Elbaum was a comrade of mine in the group Line of March and a respected organizer who came out of SDS. His recounting of yesteryear revolutionaries uncovers so much about the US left — enlightening, embarrassing, and heartbreaking.