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Am I missing something obvious here, or is this immediately debunked by the word "specialization"? The only people who could "just use their commodity" for the entirety of their needs are subsistence farmers, who I guess still existed when the book was written, but were on the way out already. And even that's only if you squint heavily, because they would need to also miraculously have every construction material they ever need in the surrounding area, which at this point moves us further back to the hunter-gathers, more or less.
I'd argue that access to information flattens the variance here, and prices are asymptotically approaching some kind of equilibrium, as exemplified by the The Digital Provide paper (see graphs at page 21). Obviously, such equilibrium would include some amount of profit for the fishermen - steelmanning the first thing I've quoted, certainly you have to get more from your work that you put in it, otherwise why work at all? Other than mere survival, but that brings us back to the subsistence farmers, which we're not, and revealed preferences even at Marx's time show that people would rather work at Dark Satanic Mills than farm.
No I think we have the same understanding here, I think there's just a confusion of terms. If you're in a factory making widgets, maybe the first twenty have a positive use value for you (maybe you can feed your robot pet with widgets). After that the use value of each widget quickly approaches 0, so you'd rather sell them on the market. The same is true for any commodity you might produce, as a subsistence farmer or otherwise. The only situation in which use value and exchange value are exactly equal (or use value is always higher) is when you have a society of hunter gatherers, as you note.
Right, so it seems to me like Marx describes a basic feature of any society more complex than an anprim one, and goes "A ha! This is an inherent problem with capitalism!". How would that follow? It's like the apocryphal story about Euler and Diderot.
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Well not exactly. The enclosures act made subsistence farming less than subsistence for most farmers, so people either had to starve or migrate to cities. It wasn't a preference.
Noted. Although now I'm interested in how the industrial revolution would look like if the inclosures never happened. Theoretically, less available workforce would put a premium on labor, which could drive innovations in labor efficiency faster, otoh there could've been not enough "critical mass" to make the early industry feasible.
This is a good question. I think the massive labor glut eventually would have happened (see the US in the early 20th century/developing countries today where people voluntarily leave/left productive farms to pursue wealth in the big city), but labor saving would probably been a priority for capitalist investment even more than it already was. I think we would also probably have a much weaker union culture, although that might be a good thing depending on who you ask.
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