These fourteen pieces were originally published in the British working-class newspaper The Pioneer; or Grand National Consolidated Trades’ Union Magazine between 15 March and 5 July 1834. Published during a period of intense social conflict, their immediate context was a prolonged struggle of the silk weavers of Derby, who were locked out by their employers for refusing to repudiate membership in their trade union; this being one aspect of a counterattack by employers and the state which also saw the imprisonment and subsequent deportation of six Dorchester laborers (the Tolpuddle martyrs) for membership in a union of agricultural workers.

In the Letters one finds as powerfully expressed as anywhere in the anti-capitalist and socialist literature of the period the idea of the commoditization of labor and an early example of an economically grounded conception of class. Like later syndicalists, Senex saw human progress in terms of the abolition of the wages system and an end to the commodification of labor – objectives he argued could be realized only through the efforts of the working class itself, not through politics. Senex advocated a system of “free or associated labor” — a decentralized, socialist economy where decision-making resided with unionists in the enterprises and trades over which they had established ownership and control.

The letters are discussed and placed in the context of contemporary working class understandings of capitalism in Noel Thompson’s “Senex’s Letters on Associated Labour and the Pioneer, 1834: A Syndicalist Political Economy in the Making,” which is Chapter 1 of Frederic S. Lee and Jon Bekken’s co-edited volume, Radical Economics and the Labor Movement (Routledge, 2009). The notes are by Noel Thompson.
The letters are downloadable as separate PDF files:

• Page 2 Letter 1: To The Union Societies
• Page 5 Letter 2: To The Productive Classes
• Page 8 Letter 3
• Page 11 Letter 4
• Page 14 Letter 5
• Page 17 Letter 6
• Page 21 Letter 7
• Page 25 Letter 8: The Representation of the Productive Class in Parliament
• Page 28 Letter 9: On The Real Object of United Labor
• Page 31 Letter 10: On The Pretended Ignorance of the Labouring Classes
• Page 34 Letter 11: On The Information of the Working Classes
• Page 38 Letter 12: Universal Suffrage As A Principle Of Union
• Page 41 Letter 13: On The Folly of Looking To Government for Social Aid
• Page 45 Letter 14: On Revolution as It Regards the Working Classes