Glad you got back safely, Michael. What you wrote about the commodity
map sounds very intriquing and not at all "too simple." Could you
possibly explain how you show some of the stuff-technical change, labor
redivision, surplus-value extraction, etc., by means of the commodity map?
BTW, even very simple things can be very illuminating. I found Massimo's
spatial representation of M-C ... P ... C'-M' at the Boston conference to
be very eye-opening. (I got a C in economic geography in college and have
been scared of it ever since). The postmodernists have been having a
lot of discussion of space. The reason it is so important to them is
unclear to me--can someone perhaps explain this to me?--but those of us
who have been emphasizing time do need to thing about space more, it seems
to me, and maybe we can learn something from them.
In Ch. 15 of Vol. III of _Capital_, Marx emphasizes a 3-fold separation of
the production of surplus-value from its "realization" for the capitalist
in the market--temporal, theoretical, but also spatial. I've never
really understood why the spatial matters.
Can anyone help out here?
Andrew Kliman