KARL MARX

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 Weitling'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 Manifesto.
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 production
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'. 13S 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