Mao’s Little Red Book was read widely on college campuses and increasingly studied by revolutionaries-in-training. From it they absorbed Mao’s lessons of making revolution through sheer political and ideological will, of not waiting for material conditions to develop of themselves, of being pragmatic and opportunistic and willing to use ambiguous rhetoric and even cruelty—and, above all, of being constantly and militantly activist even to the point of wildness and irrationality. Make the revolution somehow and anyhow!
