Bulgakov for his part triumphantly points out that foreign commerce is indeed not a pit and certainly not a bottomless one, but rather appears as a double-edged sword, that exports always belong with imports, and that the two usually counterbalance one another. Thus, whatever is pushed out over one border, will be brought back, in a changed use-form, over another. 'We must find room for the commodities that have been imported as an equivalent of those exported, within the bounds of the given market, and as this is impossible, _ex hypothesi_, it would only generate new difficulties to have recourse to an external demand.'[314] On another occasion he says that the way to realise the surplus value found by the Russian 'populists', viz. external markets, 'is much less favourable than that discovered by Malthus, v. Kirchmann and Vorontsov himself when he wrote the essay _On Militarism and Capitalism_'.[315] Although Bulgakov fervently copies Marx's diagram of reproduction, he here exhibits no grasp whatever of the real problem towards which the sceptics from Sismondi to Nikolayon were groping their way. He denies that foreign commerce solves the difficulty as pretended, since it again brings the surplus value that has been disposed of into the country, although in a 'changed form'. In conformity with the crude picture of v. Kirchmann and Vorontsov, he thus believes the problem to be that of destroying a certain quantity of the surplus value, of wiping it from the face of the earth. It simply does not occur to him that the real problem is the realisation of the surplus value, the metamorphosis of commodities, in fact the 'changed form' of the surplus value. Bulgakov thus finally arrives at the same goal as Struve, though by a different route. He preaches the self-sufficiency of capitalist accumulation which swallows up its own product as Kronos swallows up his children, and breeds ever more vigorously without help from outside. Now only one further step is needed for Marxism to revert to bourgeois economics, and this, as luck would have it, was taken by Tugan Baranovski. FOOTNOTES: [300] S. Bulgakov, _On the Markets of Capitalist Production. A Study in Theory_ (Moscow, 1897), p. 15. [301] Ibid., p. 32, footnote. [302] Ibid., p. 27. [303] Ibid., pp. 2-3. [304] _On the Markets of Capitalist Production_, pp. 50, 55. [305] _On the Markets of Capitalist Production_, p. 132 ff. [306] Ibid., p. 20. [307] Bulgakov's italics. [308] _Capital_, vol. iii, p. 387. [309] Bulgakov, op. cit., p. 161. [310] Ibid., p. 167. [311] Bulgakov, op. cit., p. 210 (our italics). [312] Ibid., p. 199.