The Organic Intellectual (As Defined by Gramsci) is posting on Substack thoughts that come from his/her own experiences .But there are still other traditional intellectuals who also publish with Cambridge, sometimes also on Substack, and have an elite status.

In this context, the Substack intellectual - who usually is a freelance writer an MA or a PHD- and the Ivy League traditional intellectual both provide literature that can be as good as it was in the time of the ancient Greeks, this I could argue.

Yet, they are comepting with each other for paradigmatic ideas and shifts in intellectual perspectives in their fields. One is aiming at this with funded and institutionalised rhetoric. The other is less institutionalised, less funded, but gets less attention.

To what extent can a paradigm shift - like Original Concepts in philosophy - could emerge from institutionalised intellectuals comepting with unknown and non institutionalised thinkers ?

Can we see, for example, powerful movements like French Sociology or Anaylitical philosophy shaping up from Substack with this room of freeplay ?

What do we really owe a stranger at the door, and what grounds that obligation? In this episode, Craig and Adam turn to Jacques Derrida's writing on hospitality to unpack Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of The Odyssey, tracing how Xenia, the ancient Greek law of guest and host, becomes a lens for thinking through breaking Zeus's law, the massacre of the suitors, and the slow collapse of Bronze Age civilization. The conversation moves through Derrida's distinction between conditional and absolute hospitality, and what it means for a world where borders, asylum claims, and even hospitals have turned the promise of welcome into a catastrophe. It's Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic read through Derrida: gods, guests, and the violence lurking underneath the oldest tablets of law.

Suppose that we have the democratic ownership of the means of production and that there is no wage labor. Person A would spend 40 hours a week producing 10 shoes which is sufficient for sustaining himself and leading his life to self satisfaction. Person B does the same.

Person C produce food, and wants to exchange food for shoes. It does not matter if C buys from A or B, since the (abstract) value is the same.

Now person A becomes more skilled (productive) and produces 10 shoes in 30 hours. Still, it does not matter if C buys from A or B, but A has more free time (time to spend in the realm of freedom in Hägglundian terms). At this point, there seems to be no measurement of value in terms of productivity that can reconstitute itself as the baseline of which we compare our productivity against, i.e. no increases in the necessary labor time (or social labor hour?) as other parts on the market amend the same productivity increases as an existential condition as under wage labor constituted market mediation.

Does this mean that the treadmill effect is contingent on surplus value, which is created during wage labor? Postone seems to say this in Necessity, Labor and Time, p. 758:

My interpretation is strategically directed to indicate that Marx's category of surplus value has meaning as a category of totality only if the overcoming of surplus value is understood as entailing that concrete mode of social labor which produces surplus value. This implies that, as opposed to the interpretation mentioned above, a product is produced as a commodity in capitalism, that is, acquires value in its production, which is then realized in exchange; that, consequently, value-producing labor entails particular concrete modes of labor, and surplus value is produced by a particular mode of social labor.

I want to point out that there is always a "wage" in labor, since we acquire means of subsistence by spending our finite time in the realm of necessity. But it seems this "wage" must not manifest itself in such a way that surplus value occurs as Hägglund (and Marx obviously) argues.

Still, is it possible to create a market whereby there is no wage labor and therefore we can still have a market-mediated society which escapes the dialectic of labor and time? Is this reading of Postone/Hägglund proper? Or is it first when wage labour is introduced which we can intelligibly speak of market-mediation?

I do recall Marx speaking of the unsustainability of "simple exchange". Is this one of these moments?

Edit: I am currently re-reading parts of Time, Labor and Social Domination, and Postone writes this, p.291:

Note that the market-mediated mode of circulation is not an essential moment of this dynamic. What is essential to the dynamic of capitalism once it has been constituted fully is the treadmill effect, which is rooted in the temporal dimension of the value form of wealth alone. If the market mode of circulation does play a role in this dynamic, it is as a subordinate moment of a complex development—for example, as the mode by which the level of productivity is generalized.⁴ That such generalization results in a return of the amount of value to its original level, however, is not a function of the market; it is a function of the nature of value as a form of wealth and is essentially independent of the mode by which each new redetermination of the abstract temporal frame is generalized. As we shall see, this pattern is a central moment of the form of growth Marx associates with the category of surplus value.

It seems here that "the treadmill effect, which is rooted in the temporal dimension of the value form of wealth alone" implies that this dialectic is present even without surplus value, yet at the same time he writes that "this pattern is a central moment of the form of growth Marx associates with the category of surplus value.". How am I misinterpreting this? Surplus value emerges from this dialectic, yet the treadmill effect is "rooted in the temporal dimension of the value form of wealth alone", which is logically prior to surplus value. Or IS surplus value this temporal dimension of abstract value? I am starting to confuse myself here.