This game of question and answer, mind you, is not a form of self-mockery, it is meant in all seriousness. 'If the expansion of production has no practical limits, then we must assume that the expansion of markets is equally unlimited, for _if social production is proportionately organised, there is no limit to the expansion of the market other than the productive forces available_.'[321] Since production thus creates its own demand, foreign commerce of capitalist states is also assigned that peculiar mechanistic function we have already met in Bulgakov. A foreign market, for instance, is an absolute necessity for England. 'Does not this prove that capitalist production creates a surplus product for which there is no room on the internal market? Why, come to that, does England require an external market? The answer is not difficult: because a considerable part of England's purchasing power is expended on obtaining foreign commodities. The import of foreign commodities for the English home market also makes it essential to export English commodities abroad. Since England cannot manage without importing from abroad, exports are a vital condition for that country, since without them she would not be able to pay for her imports.'[322] Here again agricultural imports are described as a stimulating and decisive factor, quite in accordance with the scheme of the German professors. What, then, is the general line of reasoning on which Tugan Baranovski supports his daring solution of the problem of accumulation, the new revelation on the problem of crises and a whole lot of others? Hard to believe, but quite incontrovertible for all that, Tugan Baranovski's proof consists exclusively and entirely--in Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, no more no less. Although he repeatedly refers rather pompously to his 'abstract analysis of the reproductive process of social capital', to the 'conclusive logic' of his analysis, this entire analysis is nothing but a copy of Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, with a different set of figures. Nowhere in the entire works of Tugan Baranovski shall we find a trace of any other argument. In Marx's diagram, admittedly, accumulation, production, realisation and exchange run smoothly with clockwork precision, and no doubt this kind of 'accumulation' can continue _ad infinitum_, just as long, that is to say, as ink and paper do not run out. And it is this harmless written exercise with mathematical equations which Tugan Baranovski quite seriously considers a _demonstration_ of such a course in real events. 'The diagrams we have adduced are bound to prove conclusively that....' On another occasion he counters Hobson, who is convinced that accumulation is impossible, with the following words: 'Diagram No. 2 of the reproduction of social capital on a rising scale corresponds to the case of capital accumulation Hobson has in mind. But does this diagram show a surplus product to come into being? Far from it.'[323]