Sam Mainwaring

Samuel "Sam" Mainwaring (1841 - 1907) was a Welsh machinist and socialist political activist who was a founding member and key leader of the Socialist League, one of the first Marxist political parties in Britain. In his later years he turned from Marxist socialism to the libertarian socialist doctrine of Anarchist Communism. He is best remembered as the father of the term "anarcho-syndicalism".

Biography

Early years

Samuel Mainwaring, known to his contemporaries as "Sam," was born 15 December 1841 in Penrhiwtyn, Neath, Wales. He was a native speaker of Welsh and retained an affinity for the tongue throughout his life.[1]

Mainwaring was raised by his family as a Unitarian. He developed into a quiet but persuasive public speaker and a tireless worker for activities which he believed important.[1]

Mainwaring was a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.[2]

Political career

Late in the 1870s, Mainwaring joined the East London Labour Emancipation League and was an early member of the Social Democratic Federation.[2] This group proved to be a disappointment, however, failing to garner support of an appreciable section of the working class and was believed by many members to overly dominated by the intellectual pretensions and nationalist political views of its patriarch and patron, Henry Hyndman.

In 1885 there came a split, in which Mainwaring joined with Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax, and his friend William Morris in forming the Socialist League.[2]

Mainwaring was a foreman of a shop which employed Tom Mann, and exerted a political influence upon him.[2]

Over time, Mainwaring's views gradually evolved from revolutionary socialism to those of Anarchist Communism.[2]

In 1891, Mainwaring moved to Swansea and there started the Swansea Socialist Society.[2] There he became associated with the fledgling anarchist newspaper Liberty, edited by J. Tochatti, formerly of the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League.[2]

In September 1903 and March 1904 Mainwaring published two issues of a short-lived newspaper called The General Strike, a publication which made detailed criticisms of the “officialism” of union bureaucracy and which publicised strikes in Europe making use of syndicalist tactics.[3]

Death and legacy

In his later years, Mainwaring lived in London.

On Sunday, September 29, 1907, while addressing a meeting on Parliament Hill Fields, Mainwaring was stricken by faintness and subsequently died.[2] He was 55 years old at the time of his death.

Mainwaring is credited with coining the phrase "anarcho-syndicalism" and it is for this he is best remembered.

Sam Mainwaring was cited as a major intellectual inspiration by the radical British labour leader Tom Mann. In his 1923 memoirs, Mann credited Mainwaring with having been "one of the very first to understand the significance of the revolutionary movement, and the first, as far as my knowledge goes, to appreciate industrial action as distinct from parliamentary action.[2]

Sam Mainwaring was the namesake of a nephew whom he adopted, Sam Mainwaring, Jr., himself an important radical activist in the international labour movement.[4]

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 Mat Kavanagh, "Some Little Known Anarchists: Sam Mainwaring," Freedom, 1934. Reprinted in KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library, no. 9 (1997).
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Tom Mann, Tom Mann's Memoirs. London: Labour Publishing Co., 1923; pg. 47.
  3. ↑ "The Great Dock Strike of 1889," Direct Action #47," August 11, 2009. Retrieved March 8, 2010.
  4. ↑ Ken John, "Sam Mainwaring and the Autonomist Tradition," Llafur, vol. 4, no. 3 (1986).

Further reading

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