Despite its exasperating opacity and lack of closure, the value debate has a vital objective: to grasp those defining aspects of capitalist society that do not appear on the visible surface space of conscious individual actors. In pursuit of this objective, careful conceptual analysis reveals that the long-standing "transformation problem" is misconceived; that the labor value dimension in the abstract capitalist economy is determinate and unique. This solution to age-old puzzles enables us to renew the study of the relation between labor-as-value and the homeostatic and systemic aspects of capitalist reproduction that cannot be reduced to individual constrained optimization.
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