Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

BRUSSELS 127

with their somewhat Utopian notions of 'community of goods' were set

aside and the aims of the League were proclaimed as 'the overthrow of

the bourgeoisie, the domination of the proletariat, the abolition of the

old bourgeois society based on class antagonisms, and the establishment

of a new society without classes and without private property'.^131 At the

end of the congress Marx and Engels were given the task of writing a

Manifesto to publicise the doctrines of the League. There are no surviving

records of these discussions, but the following vivid description of the

impression made by Marx at that time was written much later by Frederick

Lessner:

Marx was then still a young man, about 28 years old, but he greatly

impressed us all. He was of medium height, broad-shouldered, powerful

in build, and vigorous in his movements. His forehead was high and

finely shaped, his hair thick and pitch-black, his gaze piercing. His

mouth already had the sarcastic curl that his opponents feared so much.

Marx was a born leader of the people. His speech was brief, convincing

and compelling in its logic. He never said a superfluous word; every

sentence contained an idea and every idea was an essential link in the

chain of his argument. Marx had nothing of the dreamer about him.

The more I realized the difference between the communism of Weit-

ling's time and that of the Communist Manifesto, the more clearly I saw

that Marx represented the manhood of socialist thought.^132

On his return to Brussels Marx had little time to compose his Mani-
festo. He immediately began to give a course of lectures on wages to
the German Workers' Educational Association.^133 Here Marx was chiefly
concerned to go beyond the idea of capital as simply composed of raw
materials, instruments of production, and so forth. He insisted that it was
only in given social conditions that such things constituted capital.

Capital, also, is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois pro-

duction relation, a production relation of bourgeois society. Are not

the means of subsistence, the instrument of labour, the raw materials

of which capital consists, produced and accumulated under given social

conditions, in definite social relations? Are they not utilised for new

production under given social conditions, in definite social relations?

And is it not just this definite social character which turns the products

necessary to new production into capital?^134

In order for capital to exist there had to be 'a class which possesses
nothing but its capacity for labour'.^13 S Capital and wage-labour were
complementary in function and entirely opposed in interest. Although for
a time working conditions might improve this only meant that the working
class could consider itself 'content with forging for itself the golden chains