MAX ELBAUM has been involved in peace, anti-racist and radical movements since joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1960s. Through the 1970s and 1980s he was active in then-widespread efforts to build a new U.S. revolutionary party as a leader of one of the main organizations in the New Communist Movement. In the 1990s, he was the editor of CrossRoads, a magazine featuring dialogue and debate among socialists and revolutionaries from different radical political traditions. In 2001, he was among the founders of War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, until 2006 a free bilingual in-print tabloid distributed nationwide and until 2011 an on-line information and analysis project. He is currently an editor of Organizing Upgrade, a web-based publication focused on assessment of the political landscape and development of effective power-building strategies for social justice movements and the left..
Max is the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, a history of the 1970s-80s New Communist Movement first published by Verso in 2002 A third edition was released in 2018 with a new foreword by Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Alicia Garza.