Capitalism doesn’t exist without people. If you’re trying to create a philosophy which explains the phenomenon of capitalism, you must “require the correlate of human cognition to find its ontological status.” I don’t see how this is a problem.
I’m not doing a very good job of explaining things because Luke always jumps in like this.
The idea is that reducing the chair to only a commodity (use and exchange value for us), as historical materialism does, is problematic.
Instead the chair ontologically exists as its own object, with or without humans. It is a commodity (and that requires people and that is okay), but that is only one of its many qualities, and certainly not the only one that exhausts it.
Onticology (and OOO and SR) isn’t trying to kick humans out of the picture entirely, it is just changing the starting point. Rather than for us as the starting point, it’s for itself.
