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hume's skepticism was epistemological not ontological. he was talking about how we interfere causality from constant conjunction, not denying brute and well known facts about material reality.

Why do you think contingency excludes laws of causation? it's not randomness, that's a different concept entirely.

contingency doesn' exclude the fact that systems are interconnected, that they influence each other or that they evolve and collide; it only means that their interactions and mutations follow no predetermined necessity. in short,, things could always have turned out otherwise. you have...

Contingency can be observed empirically, the changes of history, collapse and failure of communism, breakdowns of old systems and birth of new ones and so on; thing-in-itself is something that's outside empirical observations.

also, it would be silly to deny that capitalism could end up, through some sort of metamorphosis, turning us all into serfs, for example. but from my point of view - i cannot deny any possibilty imaginable, even global communism (although seems highly unlikley, at least i hope so)

i'm not indulging in any kind of apologetics about the beauties (or horrors) of free market either. it's just a dumb, amoral (but not immoral as many lefties moralize it) mechanism that tends to produce higher and higher general standarts of living wherever applied. Obviously it creates a...

no, because those improvements (not just in Eastern Europe, but in many parts of the globe) were due to contingency, as a side effecy you could say. it's not any sort of dialectical necessity or progress that's exactly the bigger point, that you see these contingencies (and predict their future...

you claim to reject foundationalism and fixed categories, but you insist that ‘matter as motion’ is ‘undeniably correct’ and exactly that sort of category. if you truly reject foundationalism - matter-in motion can’t serve as your ground any more than "consciousness" could. and on what...

because if you concede contradictions can resolve in non-teleological ways doesn’t your ‘asymmetrical dialectics’ collapse into simple description of change—not a law of progress towards global communism?

why must your asymmetrical contradictions resolve progressively toward higher syntheses, if not because you have smuggled hegel's teleological absolute into materialism?

i mean, it's circular and endlessley self-referential loop. which is ok, because nothing can escape that. the problem is more the claim that something, some form of knowledge can

if interconnectedness justifies using hegel’s theology to explain materialism, doesn’t your ‘matter-in-motion’ dissolve into the very idealism you dislike?

I don't deny it though

if your critique of ‘religious doom’ requires you to borrow hegel's theology and philosophy’s tools (Marx), isn't your ‘materialism’ justa a prisoner of the very system it claims to escape?

obviously a foundational claim again

it's the same again. a claim made from within certain hegelian framework with no possibility of being proven (or disproven) if you step outside that framework. it's basically "trust me bro"

if your "matter-in-motion’" is beyond philosophy, why does explaining it require Hegel’s dialectics and his idealist theology?

if ‘materialism as matter-in-motion’ transcends philosophy and language, how do you articulate this truth without relying on the very philosophical constructs (words, ideas, frameworks) you dismiss as idealist?

But you just made a foundational ontological claim - the philosopher determines social being by social consciousness, whereas the materialist proper determines social consciousness by social being.

I mean, this distinction/observation was made from within a marxist framework, but is there any way of proving it by stepping outside the marxist framework itself? if this claim—that social being determines social consciousness—is internally consistent within marxism, but cannot be verified...