Two sides I have seen:
For: Dislocated proletariat is the moving force of history that renew the dying material world. The people are the ones who create history. The revolutionaries will come between the chaos and guide the dislocated people to a better path, each time a better world.
The dishearted and unawakened must know that history is about revolution, and we walk on the path of history without hesitation. A lot of people project the duality of the present state unto the future. As to make the future uncertain. Wrong, there is only one future. The end is the past, but the future is the beginning. Therefore a true communist should not be discouraged and fall into nihlism, because the future is determined. The only thing left for us to do is fight.
Against: The future is not determined yet. A materialist or anyone who claims to be a communist will not hold this idea. It results in waiting, waiting for the time, waiting for the proletarian “wake” and have “classes conscious”. This is a kantian leftist, not a hegelian leftist. We don’t believe that there is a decided, unchanged future “waiting ” for us. The only thing it lead to is the economy determinism like Ti1. For Lenin in 1917, there is no big other can say that the revolution will succeeded. Future determines past by the mediation of subjects’ practice.
If not for global warming I would say yes. I do think humanity could survive even very bad global warming. People? No, the species could though. We'd be close to starting over from the copper age. So it might only be a few thousamd years before we get to try science again. We might make it that time.
The romans could have had full comunism. We could have full comunism. If the revolution never happens elon musk's great great grandkids will get to enjoy it on mars and our descendants will have long been eaten by eels in the boiling sea.
Which is better than nothing, but not really emotionally satisfying.
I don't think the Romans had the surplus for Communism, since it requires a certain centralisation of the means of production. Additionally, the Patrician/Plebean/Slave Class contradictions of a Roman slave state don't contain a class that can remove classes entirely
They had the surplus, but you are right they socially didn't have the conditions to create such developments. There is some debate, but they probably could have done the industrial revolution if the social conditions had stacked up. They were unlikely to stack up that way in that region at that time, but an well managed empire might have pulled it off in a better timeline.
I'm not sure they did, even 16th century economies outdid Rome as percentage surplus. They could have pushed into a guild-era economy, maybe, but the latifundia would have crippled local capital development in the same way it did in the slave economies of the Americas. Until that was resolved the society could not progress.
That said they had shit like fractional reserve banking so maybe something might have been done in the Second Century before things ossified.
Sounds like you are better informed than I am on the subject then. I'll try to read up on that more then.
There's an article that I can't find for the life of me about how if we were reset to the Stone Age, the lack of easily accessible minerals like copper and coal would be a huge issue. There's still plenty of minerals on Earth, of course, so we might eventually get there, but most of the stuff like rare earth elements that's economical to mine (AKA in significant concentrations) is gone, or in the ruins somewhere, or only found in any real abundance at certain places on Earth. Also consider that most institutional knowledge would be lost in the bloody transition. But the development of modern civilization was an iterative process requiring previous tiers to be met in turn to advance to the next one, and if we just don't find much coal to do the industrial revolution again and most of the easy to get oil has already been extracted and burned, then we might be stuck in pre-industry for many thousands of years longer. And all the while, the Earth is continuing to warm from our previous emissions making agriculture more difficult, there are microplastics literally everywhere, and catastrophic events like large meteorite impacts and supervolcano eruptions may occur in the interim.
IIRC, that article said that perhaps mass wood burning for charcoal could achieve the industrial revolution if we managed to figure out that steam power was possible, but that leads to further issues, especially if we imagine a kind of Lorax situation happening where we cut and burn most of the trees around us for energy and then realize that that might be a bad thing to do. But equally, perhaps a scarcity of resources means that hoarding and exploitation is less desirable or even possible and we kinda speedrun capitalism into communism.