>>520552Technically, not really.
>The German bourgeoisie, which had only just begun to establish its large-scale industry, had neither the strength nor the courage to win for itself unconditional domination in the state, nor was there any compelling necessity for it to do so. The proletariat, undeveloped to an equal degree, having grown up in complete intellectual enslavement, being unorganised and still not even capable of independent organisation, possessed only a vague feeling of the profound conflict of interests between it and the bourgeoisie. Hence, although in point of fact the mortal enemy of the latter, it remained, on the other hand, its political appendage. Terrified not by what the German proletariat was, but by what it threatened to become and what the French proletariat already was, the bourgeoisie saw its sole salvation in some compromise, even the most cowardly, with the monarchy and nobility; as the proletariat was still unaware of its own historical role, the bulk of it had, at the start, to take on the role of the forward-pressing, extreme left wing of the bourgeoisie. The German workers had above all to win those rights which were indispensable to their independent organisation as a class party: freedom of the press, association and assembly — rights which the bourgeoisie, in the interest of its own rule ought to have fought for, but which it itself in its fear now began to dispute when it came to the workers. The few hundred separate League members vanished in the enormous mass that had been suddenly hurled into the movement. Thus, the German proletariat at first appeared on the political stage as the extreme democratic party.Engels | *Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848–49)* | 1884
Communism is not the left or right of the current state of things, it is the negation of the current state of things.
>Communism is for us not a *state of affairs* which is to be established, an *ideal* to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the *real* movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.Marx | [5. Development of the Productive Forces as a Material Premise of Communism], A. Idealism and Materialism, I. Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist
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