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270 Chapter 15 Robert Negin,“Fraternal Dissents on Max Shachtman and American Trotskyism,”November 1990. Introduction In this conversation with Robert Negin, a fellow onetime Trotskyist, Howe digs deeply into his own Trotskyist past, offering “second thoughts” on his radical youth that venture much further than does A Margin of Hope. Doubtless because he and Negin shared a similar trajectory, Howe felt comfortable in this previously unpublished interview discussing both Socialism ’s erratic, problematic history and his own complicated relationship with Max Shachtman. Like Howe, who became a Socialist at age fourteen, Negin joined the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) in 1938, at the age of eighteen. Although they were members of different wings of the YPSL, Negin heard Howe on the podium and recalls that he was “a superb orator.” They fell out of contact after their years at YPSL, and it was not until November 1990, when Negin was pursuing a Ph.D. at the City University of New York, that he reconnected with Howe for this interview. After Negin’s advisor in the American History program, John Diggins, suggested that he engage in research on the life and career of Max Shachtman, Negin interviewed Howe about the Trotskyist tribune whom both had once followed. Negin grew up in Newark, New Jersey. His father was a Socialist from western Russia who took part in the revolution of 1905. When the White Russians were defeated, Negin’s father emigrated to the United States in 1907, where he abbreviated the family name (originally “Neginuitsky”) and bought a candy store in Newark. During Negin’s youth, his father also owned a linen supply story, Interview with Robert Negin, November 1990 271 which Negin began to run himself a few years after his father’s suicide in 1933, when Negin was fifteen. In the 1930s, Negin became a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which was closely associated with and a strong supporter of Leon Trotsky. In 1939, the SWP splintered when Max Shachtman and James Burnham started a new faction, based on disagreements over U.S. involvement in World War II and their belief that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers’ state but a tyranny. Unlike Irving Howe, Negin remained a Party member and did not join Shachtman’s breakaway sect. That group would eventually become the Independent Socialist League (ISL), but its membership never totaled more than one thousand. Despite his polemical talents as a brilliant speaker and masterful controversialist—a gift that he shared with Trotksy—Shachtman remained a solitary sectarian infighter, a fundamentalist wielding little influence on the far Left. Both Howe and Negin were the progeny of Shachtman, yet both men broke from him. Negin had no contact with Shachtman after 1939.1 Indeed, Negin continued to run the family candy store until he was drafted into the Navy in 1943, at the age of 25. For Howe, Shachtman may be seen as the missing link, the rarely acknowledgedbridgefigurebetweentheSocialistpoliticianswhomthematureHowemost esteemed, Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington. Howe admired those two unequivocally, but he was more closely connected to Shachtman, both personally and politically, especially in his youth. In Howe’s autobiography, Shachtman suffers a similar fate to that of Trotsky. Howe had long since distanced himself from both Trotskyism and from the kind of conservatism to which Shachtman had migrated by the late 1960s; by the 1980s he had no substantial ties remaining to either man. Nevertheless, Shachtman resembled Harrington in certain respects: a skilled rhetorician and virtuoso verbal duelist, a tireless campaigner, and a talented writer. More so than either Howe or Harrington, however, Shachtman remained a leader without followers, a thinker whose grand visions detoured into dead ends. As Howe explains, probing into his roots further here than elsewhere, Shachtman “was never a mass leader. He was always living in the world of the small group, the sect,” a condition symptomatic of the Marxist Left in America throughout the twentieth century. Given his growing doubts regarding Trotskyism and his increasingly close associations with the Partisan Review circle (some of them former Trotskyists and/or Shachtmanites), Howe came more and more to support intellectual independence. Howe finally resigned from the ISL in November 1952. Shachtman in turn rebuked Howe bitterly, and the two severed ties permanently. While Howe appreciated his new intellectual freedom, he felt the lack of group solidarity in a common cause. In 1954, he formed Dissent, at least partly as an attempt to combine the activist spirit of a small...

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