Bulgakov further develops a completely erroneous theory of foreign commerce, based upon his misapprehension of the relations between consumption and production in capitalist economy. A picture of reproduction like the above in fact has no room for foreign commerce. If capitalism forms a 'closed circle' in every country from the very beginning, if, chasing its tail like a puppy and in complete 'self-sufficiency', it is able of itself to create an unlimited market for its products and can spur itself on to ever greater expansion, then every capitalist country as such must also be a closed and self-sufficient economic whole. In but a single respect would foreign commerce appear reasonable: to compensate, by imports from abroad, for certain deficiencies due to the soil and the climate, i.e. the import of raw materials or foodstuffs from sheer necessity. Completely upsetting the thesis of the 'populists', Bulgakov in fact advances a theory of international commerce among capitalist states which gives pride of place to the import of agricultural products, with industrial exports merely providing the requisite funds. International traffic in commodities does not here seem to flow from the character of the mode of production but from the natural conditions of the countries concerned. This theory at any rate has not been borrowed from Marx but from the economic experts of the German bourgeoisie. Just as Struve took over from Wagner and Schaeffle his Three Empire Theory, so Bulgakov adopts from the late List (_R.I.P._) the division of states on the basis of 'agriculture' and 'mixed agriculture and manufacture', or rather adapts it, in deference to the times, to the categories of 'manufacture' and 'mixed manufacture and agriculture'. Nature has afflicted the first category with a deficiency in raw materials and foodstuffs, making it thus dependent upon foreign commerce. The second category has been liberally endowed with all it needs; here foreign trade is of no account. The prototype of the first category is England, of the second--the U.S.A. The stoppage of foreign commerce would mean the economic death-blow to England, but only a temporary crisis in the U.S.A. with a guarantee of full recovery. 'Production there is capable of unlimited expansion on the basis of the internal market.'[312] This theory, a hoary relic of German economics even now, has obviously not the least grasp of the interrelations obtaining in an international capitalist economy. It conceives of modern international trade in terms that may have been appropriate to the times of the Phoenicians. Just listen to the lecture of Professor Buecher: