The life of Tom Mann
By Cathy Nugent The socialist and trade union organiser Tom Mann was a rather exceptional person. Not because he was a great socialist theorist — although he published many pamphlets in the course of a political life which only ended when he died in 1941, as a member of the Communist Party. Rather it is because, over sixty years, he was involved in most, if not all, of the significant working class organisations of that long period. He was prominent in the early Marxist organisation, the Social Democratic Federation, during the 1880s. He was a leader of the “new unionism” of the late 1880s. He...