This organization was composed of revolutionary elements of various shades, and had been originally a conspiratory society devoted to the Young German idea, an offshoot of Mazzini's Young Europe agitation. In 1847, when Marx and Engels were invited to join the league, this organization represented the only internationally organized expression of the European proletariat. Its principles were a mixture of French-English Communism evolved and born with the aid of German philosophy: They were teachings as mysterious and hazy as the mystery with which their propagators surrounded themselves. After a thorough discussion with Joseph Moll, a representative of the League, Marx and Engels decided to join the organization, and reorganize the movement along lines fully in accord with their principles: the principles of scientific Socialism in the making. These principles of Marx in 1847, as today, strove and aimed primarily at the political unification of the laboring classes into a compact proletarian political party, pursuing a definite revolutionary aim, flowing from a clear and scientific conception of the workers' position in society. As we have seen, these principles were not the result of abstract Utopian speculations, evolved as a protest against the barbaric injustice and inhumanity of bourgeois society, and proclaiming to be the only true offspring of pure reason, divine justice and true humanity, but were rather the product of a thorough analysis of the capitalist mode of production: an analysis which exposed the origin of profit or surplus value, and thereby projected the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Of course, such principles based upon the bedrock of sound economics were bound to collide with the Utopianism on the one hand and the Nihilism on the other of the various intellectuals in the League of the Just. Marx anticipated this conflict, but was also convinced that the abstract speculative idiosyncracies of a Cabet or Weitling were no match for the coherent and irrefutable arguments and recommendations contained in the "Communist Manifesto." In November and December Marx and Engels attended a Congress of the League in London, and the message of Marx,
