... [2] that awareness of the death of the bourgeoisie has already penetrated the consciousness even of the German bourgeois, so the German bourgeois is naive enough himself to admit this "sad fact".
"For this reason also it is so sad that the evils which in our day accompany industry are advanced as a reason for rejecting industry itself. There exist far greater evils than a social estate [Stand] of proletarians: an empty exchequer— national impotence — national slavery — national death" (p. LXVU).
It is truly sadder that the proletariat already exists and already advances claims, and already inspires fear, before the German bourgeois has yet achieved the development of industry. As far as the proletarian himself is concerned, he will certainly find his social situation [Stand] a happy one when the ruling bourgeoisie has a full exchequer and national might. Herr List only speaks about what is sadder for the bourgeois. And we admit that for him it is very sad that he wants to establish the domination of industry precisely at the unsuitable moment when the slavery of the majority resulting from this domination has become a generally known fact. The German bourgeois is the knight of the rueful countenance, who wanted to introduce knight-errantry just when the police and money had come to the fore.
3. A great inconvenience (obstacle)[97] affecting the German bourgeois in his striving for industrial wealth is his idealism professed hitherto. How is it that this nation of the "spirit" suddenly comes to find the supreme blessings of mankind in calico, knitting yarn, the self-acting mule, in a mass of factory slaves, in the materialism of machinery, in the full money-bags of Messrs. the factory-owners? The empty, shallow, sentimental idealism of the German bourgeois, beneath which lies hidden (is concealed) the pettiest, dirtiest and most cowardly shopkeeper's spirit (soul), has arrived at the epoch when this bourgeois is inevitably compelled to divulge his secret. But again he divulges it in a truly German, highflown manner. He divulges it with an idealistic-Christian sense of shame. He disavows wealth while striving for it. He clothes spiritless materialism in an idealistic disguise and only then ventures to pursue it.
The whole theoretical part of List's system is nothing but a [ ] a disguising of the industrial materialism of frank political economy in idealistic phrases. Everywhere he allows the thing to remain in existence but idealises the expression of it. We shall trace this in detail. It is just this empty idealistic phraseology that enables him to ignore the real barriers standing in the way of his pious wishes and to indulge in the most absurd fantasies (what would have become of the English and French bourgeoisie if it had first to ask a high-ranking nobility, an esteemed bureaucracy and the ancient ruling dynasties for permission to give "industry" the "force of law"?).
The German bourgeois is religious even when he is an indus-trialist. He shrinks from speaking about the nasty exchange values which he covets and speaks about productive forces [von Produktiv-kräften]; he shrinks from speaking about competition and speaks of a national confederation of national productive forces; he shrinks from speaking of his private interest and speaks about the national interest. When one looks at the frank, classic cynicism with which the English and French bourgeoisie, as represented by its first — at least at the beginning of its domination — scientific spokesmen of political economy, elevated wealth into a god and ruthlessly sacrificed everything else to it, to this Moloch, in science as well, and when, on the other hand, one looks at the idealising, phrase-mongering, bombastic manner of Herr List, who in the midst of political economy despises the wealth of "righteous men" and knows loftier aims, one is bound to find it "also sad" that the present day is no longer a day for wealth.
Herr List always speaks in Molossus metre.[98] He continually shows off in a clumsy and verbose rhetoric, the troubled waters of which always drive him in the end on to a sandbank, and the essence of which consists of constant repetitions about protective
There are three illegible words in the manuscript here, apparently meaning "fallen in front of him".—Ed.
tariffs and true German ["teutsche"] factories. He is continually sensuously supersensuous.
The German idealising philistine who wants to become wealthy must, of course, first create for himself a new theory of wealth, one which makes wealth worthy of his striving for it. The bourgeois in France and England see the approach of the storm which will destroy in practice the real life of what has hitherto been called wealth, but the German bourgeois, who has not yet arrived at this inferior wealth, tries to give a new, "spiritualistic" interpretation of it. He creates for himself an "idealising" political economy, which has nothing in common with profane French and English political economy, in order to justify to himself and the world that he, too, wants to become wealthy. The German bourgeois begins his creation of wealth with the creation of a highflown hypocritically idealising political economy.
3." How Herr List interprets history and what attitude he adopts towards Smith and his school.
Humble as is Herr List's attitude to the nobility, the ancient ruling dynasties and the bureaucracy, he is to the same degree "audacious" in opposing French and English political economy, of which Smith is the protagonist, and which has cynically betrayed the secret of "wealth" and made impossible all illusions about its nature, tendency and movement. Herr List lumps them all together by calling them "the School". For since the German bourgeois is concerned with protective tariffs, the whole development of political economy since Smith has, of course, no meaning for him, because all its most outstanding representatives presup-pose the present-day bourgeois society of competition and free trade.
The German philistine here reveals his "national" character in many ways.
1) In the whole of political economy, he sees only systems concocted in academic study rooms. That the development of a science such as political economy is connected with the real movement of society, or is only its theoretical [3] expression, Herr List, of course, does not suspect. A German theoretician.
2) Since his own work (theory) conceals a secret aim, he suspects secret aims everywhere.
Being a true German philistine, Herr List, instead of studying real history, looks for the secret, bad aims of individuals, and, owing to his cunning, he is very well able to discover them (puzzle them out). He makes great discoveries, such as that Adam Smith wanted to deceive the world by his theory, and that the whole world let itself be deceived by him until the great Herr List woke it from its dream, rather in the way that a certain Düsseldorf Counsellor of Justice made out that Roman history had been invented by medieval monks in order to justify the domination of Rome.
But just as the German bourgeois knows no better way of opposing his enemy than by casting a moral slur on him, casting aspersions on his frame of mind, and seeking bad motives for his actions, in short, by bringing him into bad repute and making him personally an object of suspicion, so Herr List also casts aspersions on the English and French economists, and retails gossip about them. And just as the German philistine does not disdain the pettiest profit-making and swindling in trade, so Herr List does not disdain to juggle with words from the quotations he gives in order to make them profitable. He does not disdain to stick the trade-mark of his rival on to his own bad products, in order to bring his rival's products into disrepute by falsifying them, or even to invent downright lies about his competitor in order to discredit him.
We shall give a few samples of Herr List's mode of procedure.
It is well known that the German priests believed they could inflict no more deadly blow on the Enlightenment than by telling us the stupid anecdote and lie that on his death-bed Voltaire had renounced his views. Herr List, too, takes us to Adam Smith's death-bed and informs us that it turned out that Smith had not been sincere in his teaching. However, listen to Herr List himself and his further verdict on Smith. We put alongside List's words the source of his wisdom.
List: [National System of Political Economy, Vol. I: International Trade, Trade Policy and the German Customs Union. Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1841:]
"I recalled from the biography by Dugald Stewart how this great mind [Adam Smith] could not die in peace before all his manuscripts had been burned, by which I wanted to make it understood how serious is the suspicion that these papers contained proofs against his sincerity" (p. Lviii). "I showed that the English Ministers [...] made use of his theory in order to throw dust into the eyes of other nations for the benefit of England" (loc.
Ferner, F.L.A., Du gouvernement considéré dans ses rapports avec le commerce, Paris,
1805:
"Is it possible that Smith was sincere in heaping up so many false arguments in favour of free trade?... Smith had as his secret aim to spread in Europe principles the adoption of which he knew very well would give his country the world market" (pp. 385, 386). "One is even justified in assuming that Smith did not always propound one and the same doctrine; and how otherwise is one to explain the torment he suffered on his death-bed because of the fear cit.). "As regards its relation to national and international conditions, Adam Smith's theory is a mere continuation of the physiocratic system. Like the latter, it ignores the nature of the nations [...] and presupposes eternal peace and universal union as already in existence" (p. 475).
that the manuscripts of his lectures would survive him" (p. 386). He [Ferner] loc. cit. (p. 388) reproaches Smith for having been a commissaire des douanes.(1) "Smith almost always argued like the economists" (physiocrats), "without taking into account the divergence between the interests of the different nations, and on the assumption of a situation where there would be only one society in the world" (p. 381). "Let us set aside all these projects of union" (p. 15).
(Monsieur Ferrier was an inspecteur des douanes under Napoleon and loved his profession.)
J.-B. Say's political economy is interpreted by Herr List as an unsuccessful speculation. We shall give below in full his categorical verdict on the life of Say. But before doing so, one more example of the way in which List copies from other authors and in copying falsifies them in order to hit at his opponents.
Count Pecchio, History of Political Economy in Italy, etc. Paris, 1830(2):
"Foreigners tried to rob Serra of the merit of having been the first founder of the principles of this science" (political economy). "What I have just said cannot be applied at all to Monsieur Say, who while always reproaching Serra for having regarded only the materials of gold and silver as wealth, nevertheless allowed him the glory of having been the first to make known the productive power of industry.... My reproach is addressed to Mr. McCulloch.... If Mr. McCulloch had read a little more than the title [of Serra's book]", etc. (pp. 76, 77).
One sees how Herr List deliberately falsifies Pecchio, from whom he copies, in order to discredit Monsieur Say. No less fatee is the biographical information given about Say.
List:
"Say and McCulloch seem not to have seen or read more than the title of this book" (that of Antonio Serra from Naples); "both loftily throw it aside with the remark: it treats only of money, and the title by itself proves that the author laboured under the delusion that the precious metals were the sole objects of wealth. If they had read on further," etc. (p. 456).
Herr List says about him:
"First a merchant, then a factory-owner, then an unsuccessful politician, Say took up political economy, as people take up some new enterprise when the old one no longer succeeds.... Hatred of the Continental System, which ruined his factory, and of the originator of this system, who drove him out of the Tribunate, caused him to come out in support of absolute freedom of trade" (pp. 488, 489).
So Say supported the system of free trade because his factory was ruined by the Continental System! But what if he had written his Traite' d'économie politique* before he owned a factory? Say became a supporter of the system of free trade because Napoleon drove him out of the Tribunate! (3)° But what if he had written his book while he was a tribune} What if Say, who according to Herr List was an unsuccessful businessman who saw in literature only a branch of business, had from his early youth played a part in the French literary world?
Where did Herr List obtain his new information? From the Historical Note on the Life and Works of J.-B. Say by Charles Comte,XÜX
which was published as an introduction to Say's Cours complet d'économie politique. What does this note tell us? It contains the opposite of all List's statements. Listen:
"J.-B. Say was intended by his father, who was a merchant, [4] to engage in trade. However, his inclination drew him to literature. In 1789 he published a pamphlet in behalf of freedom of the press. From the outset of the revolution he contributed to the newspaper Courrier de Provence, published by Mirabeau. He also worked in the office of the Minister Clavière. His penchant 'for the moral and political sciences', as also his father's bankruptcy, caused him to give up trade completely and to make scientific activity his sole occupation. In 1794 he became editor-in-chief of the Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique. In 1799 Napoleon appointed him a member of the Tribunate. The spare time left him from his function as tribune he used to work on his Traité politique, which he published in 1803. He was dismissed from the Tribunate because he belonged to the few who dared to be in opposition. He was offered a lucrative post in the finance department, but he refused although chargé de six enfants et n'ayant presque point de fortune ..., since he would not have been able to carry out the duties of the post offered him without taking part in implementing a system which he had condemned as being disastrous for France. He preferred to start up a cotton-spinning mill, etc."
If the slur which Herr List here casts on J.-B. Say owes its origin to falsification, this is no less the case with the praise List bestows on the brother, Louis Say. To prove that Louis Say shares the crafty [listig](4) view, List falsifies a passage from this author.
Herr List says on p. 484:
"In his" (Louis Say's) "opinion, the wealth of nations consists not in material goods and their exchange value, but in the ability continually to produce these goods."
According to Herr List, the following are Louis Say's own words:
The Louis Say of Herr List: The real Louis Say:
"La richesse ne consiste pas dans les "Quoique la richesse ne consiste pas choses qui satisfont nos besoins ou nos dans les choses qui satisfont nos besoins goûts, mais dans le pouvoir d'en jouir ou nos goûts, mais dans le revenu ou annuellement" (Etudes sur la richesse des dans le pouvoir d'en jouir annuelle-notions, p. 10).a ment."b
Thus, Say is not speaking of the ability to produce, but of the ability to enjoy, of the ability which provides the "income" (revenu) of a nation. From the disproportion between the growing productive force and the income of the nation as a whole, and of all its classes in particular, there arose precisely the theories most inimical to Herr List as, for example, those of Sismondi and Cherbuliez.
Let us now give an example of Herr List's ignorance in his verdict on the "School". He says about Ricardo (List on productive forces):
"In general, since Adam Smith, the School has been unfortunate in its researches into the nature of rent. Ricardo, and following him Mill, McCulloch and others, hold that rent is paid for the natural productivity inherent in plots of land. Ricardo based a whole system on this view.... Since he considered only English conditions, he was misled into the erroneous view that these English ploughed fields and meadows, for the apparently natural productivity of which such fine rent is paid at the present time, have been the very same ploughed fields and meadows at all times" (p. 360).
Ricardo says:
"If the surplus produce which land affords in the form of rent be an advantage, it is desirable that, every year, the machinery newly constructed should be less efficient than the old, as that would undoubtedly give a greater exchange-able value to the goods manufactured ... in the kingdom; and a rent would be paid to all those who possessed the most productive machinery." "Rent increases most rapidly, as the disposable land decreases in its productive powers. Wealth increases most rapidly in those countries ... where through agricultural improvements, productions can be multiplied without any increase in the proportional quantity of labour, and where consequently the progress of .ent is slow." (Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy, etc. Paris, 1835, Vol. I, pp. 77 and 80-82.)c
"Wealth consists not in the objects which satisfy our requirements or our tastes, but in the possibility of enjoying them annually." (Researches into the Wealth of Nations, p. 10.)—Ed.
"Although wealth consists not in the objects which satisfy our requirements or our tastes, but in income, or in the possibility of enjoying it annually."—Ed.
According to Ricardo's theory, rent, far from being the consequence of the natural productivity inherent in the soil, is rather a consequence of the constantly increasing unproductiveness of the soil, a consequence of civilisation and the increasing population. According to Ricardo, as long as the most fertile land is still available in an unlimited amount, there is still no land rent. Hence rent is determined by the ratio of the population to the amount of available land.
Ricardo's theory, which serves as the theoretical basis for the whole Anti-Corn-Law League[3] in England and the anti-rent movement in the free states of North America,[102] had to be falsified by Herr List — assuming he had more than hearsay knowledge of it — if only because it proves how little the "free, mighty and wealthy bourgeois" are inclined to work "diligently" for [the increase of] "land rents" and to bring them [the landowners] honey from the hive.[103] Ricardo's theory of land rent is nothing but the economic expression of a life-and-death struggle of the industrial bourgeois against the landowners.
Herr List instructs us further about Ricardo as follows:
"At the present time the theory of exchange value has fallen into such impotence ... that Ricardo ... could say: 'to determine the laws by which the yield from land is distributed between landowners, tenant-farmers and workers is the chief task of political economy'" (p. 493).
The necessary observations on this are to be made in the appropriate place.(5)
[5] Herr List reaches the height of infamy in his verdict on Sismondi.
List: Sismondi:
"He" (Sismondi) "wants, for exam-"My objections are not to machines, pie, the spirit of inventiveness to be not to inventions, not to civilisation, but curbed and bridled" (p. xxix). only to the modern organisation of society, which deprives the working man of any property other than his hands, and gives him no guarantee against competition, of which he will inevitably become a victim. Suppose that all people share equally in the product of the labour in which they have participated, then every technical invention will in all possible cases be a blessing for all of them" (Nouveaux principes d.'économie politique, Paris, 1827, t. Il, p. 433).
Whereas Herr List casts moral aspersions on Smith and Say he can only explain the theory of Monsieur Sismondi from the latter's bodily defects. He says:
"Monsieur de Sismondi sees with his bodily eyes everything red as black; it seems that his spiritual sight in matters of political economy suffers from the same defect" (p. xxix).
In order to appreciate to the full the vileness of this outburst, one must know the passage from which Herr List derived his remark. Sismondi says in his Etudes sur l'économie politique, where he speaks of the devastation of the Roman Campagna:
"The rich tints of the Roman Campagna ... even entirely escape our eyes, for which the red ray is non-existent" (p. 6). Brussels reprint, 1838 [Vol. II].
Sismondi explains this by saying: "the charm which attracts all other travellers to Rome" is destroyed for him and he "therefore has eyes that are all the more open to see the real, miserable condition of the inhabitants of the Campagna."
If de Sismondi did not see the rosy tints of the sky which magically illumine the whole (factory) industry for Herr List, he did see the red cock on the gables (roofs) of these factories. We shall have an opportunity later(6) [to examine] List's verdict that
"Monsieur de Sismondi's writings on international trade and trade policy are without any value" [p. xxix].
Whereas Herr List explains Smith's system from the latter's personal vanity (p. 476) and the hidden English shopkeeper's mental-ity, and Say's system from a desire for revenge and as a business enterprise, in regard to Sismondi he descends so low as to explain Sismondi's system from the defects of his bodily constitution.
[5] 4. Herr List's Originality
It is highly characteristic of Herr List that, despite all his boasting, he has put forward not a single proposition that had not been advanced long before him not only by the defenders of the prohibitive system, but even by writers of the "School" invented by Herr List — if Adam Smith is the theoretical starting-point of political economy, then its real point of departure, its real school, is "civil society" [die bürgerliche Gesellschaft], of which the different phases of development can be accurately traced in political economy. Only the illusions and idealising language (phrases)
belong to Herr List. We consider it important to give detailed proof of this to the reader and must claim his attention for this tedious labour. He will derive from it the conviction that the German bourgeois comes on the scene post festum, that it is just as impossible for him to advance further the political economy exhaustively developed by the English and French as it would probably be for them to contribute anything new to the development of philosophy in Germany. The German bourgeois can only add his illusions and phrases to the French and English reality. But little possible as it is for him to give a new development to political economy, it is still more impossible for him to achieve in practice a further advance of industry, of the by now almost exhausted development on the present foundations of society.
5. We therefore restrict our criticism to the theoretical part of List's book, and in fact only to his main discoveries.
What are the main propositions which Herr List has to prove? Let us inquire into the aim he wants to achieve.
1) The bourgeois wants protective tariffs from the state in order to lay his hands on state power and wealth. But since [in Germany], unlike in England and France, he does not have state power at his disposal and therefore cannot arbitrarily guide it as he likes, but has to resort to requests, it is necessary for him in relation to the state, the activity (mode of action) of which he wants to control for his own benefit, to depict his dem.and from it as a concession that he makes to the state, whereas [in reality] he demands concessions from the state. Therefore, through the medium of Herr List, he [the German bourgeois] proves to the state that his theory differs from all others in that he allows the state to interfere in and control industry, in that he has the highest opinion of the economic wisdom of the state, and only asks it to give full scope for its wisdom, on condition, of course, that this wisdom is limited to providing "strong" protective tariffs. His demand that the state should act in accordance with his interests is depicted by him as recognition of the state, recognition that the state has the right to interfere in the sphere of civil society.
2) The bourgeois [Bürger] wants to become rich, to make money; but at the same time he must come to terms with the present idealism of the German public and with his own conscience. Therefore he tries to prove that he does not strive for unrighteous material goods, but for a spiritual essence, for an infinite productive force, instead of bad, finite exchange values. Of course, this spiritual essence involves the circumstance that the "citizen" ["Bürger"] takes this opportunity to fill his own pockets with worldly exchange values.
[6](7) Since the bourgeois now hopes to become rich mainly through "protective tariffs", and since protective tariffs can enrich him only insofar as no longer Englishmen, but the German bourgeois himself, will exploit his fellow-countrymen, indeed exploit them even more than they were exploited from abroad, and since protective tariffs demand a sacrifice of exchange values from the consumers (chiefly from the workers who are to be superseded by machines, from all those who draw a fixed income, such as officials, recipients of land rent, etc.), the industrial bourgeois has therefore to prove that, far from hankering after material goods, he wants nothing else but the sacrifice of exchange values, material goods, for a spiritual essence. Fundamentally, therefore, it is solely a matter of self-sacrifice, of asceticism, of Christian grandeur of the soul. It is pure accident that A makes the sacrifice, but B puts the sacrifice in his pocket. The German bourgeois is much too unselfish to think in this connection of his private gain, which accidentally proves to be linked with this sacrifice. But if it should turn out that a class whose permission the German bourgeois thinks he requires for his emancipation, cannot go along with this spiritual theory, then this theory must be abandoned and, in opposition to the School [which advocates freedom of trade], precisely the theory of exchange values be brought into play.
3) Since the whole desire of the bourgeoisie amounts, in essence, to bringing the factory system to the level of "English" prosperity and making industrialism the regulator of society, i.e., to bringing about the disorganisation of society, the bourgeois has to prove that he is only concerned for the harmonisation of all social production, and for the organisation of society. He restricts foreign trade by means of protective tariffs, while agriculture, he maintains, will rapidly attain its highest prosperity owing to manufacturing industry. The organisation of society, therefore, is summed up in the factories. They are the organisers of society, and the system of competition which they bring into being is the finest confederation of society.[104] The organisation of society which the factory system creates is the true organisation of society.
The bourgeoisie is certainly right in conceiving in general its interests as identical interests, just as the wolf as a wolf has an identical interest with his fellow wolves, however much it is to the interest of each individual wolf that he and not another should pounce on the prey.
6. Finally, it is characteristic of Herr List's theory, as also of the
entire German bourgeoisie, that in order to defend their desires to exploit they are compelled everywhere to resort to "socialist" phrases and thus forcibly to maintain a deception that has long been refuted. We shall show in various passages[3] that Herr List's phrases, if the consequences are drawn from them, are communistic. We, of course, are far from accusing someone like Herr List and his German bourgeoisie of communism, but this affords us fresh proof of the internal weakness, falsity and infamous hypocrisy of the "good-natured", "idealistic" bourgeois. It proves to us that his idealism in practice is nothing but the unscrupulous, unthinking disguise of a repulsive materialism.
Finally, it is characteristic that the German bourgeoisie begins with the lie with which the French and English bourgeoisie ends,— after reaching a position where it is compelled to apologise for itself, to offer excuses for its existence.
7. Since Herr List distinguishes the present, ostensibly cosmopolitan, political economy from his own (national-political) economy by the former being based on exchange values and the latter on productive forces, we have to start with this theory. Furthermore, since the confederation of productive forces is supposed to represent the nation in its unity, we have also to examine this theory prior to the above-mentioned distinction. These two theories form the real basis of [List's] national economy as distinct from political economy.[6]
* * *
It can never occur to Herr List that the real organisation of society is a soulless materialism, an individual spiritualism, individualism. It can never occur to him that the political economists have only given this social state of affairs a corresponding theoretical expression. Otherwise, he would have to direct his criticism against the present organisation of society instead of against the political economists. He accuses them of not having found any embellishing expression for a cheerless reality. Hence he wants to leave this reality everywhere just as it is and only change the expression of it. Nowhere does he criticise real society, but like a true German, he criticises the theoretical expression of this society and reproaches it for expressing the real thing and not an imaginary notion of the real thing.
The factory is transformed into a goddess, the goddess of manufacturing power.
The factory-owner is the priest of this power.(8)
Endnotes
[96] This work — a draft of an article against the German economist Friedrich List — was recently discovered among Marx's manuscripts which remained for a long time in the keeping of the grandchildren of his eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet. Marx and Engels had reacted critically to List's book (published in 1841) as early as February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (see present edition, Vol. 3, 178, 421). Later they concluded that a full-scale criticism should be published of his views as typifying the attitudes of the German bourgeoisie — its striving for complete freedom of action to exploit the German workers without prejudice to the privileges of the nobility and its support of the feudal-monarchical political system while seeking to force the government to protect bourgeois interests against foreign competition. In a letter to Marx on November 19, 1844, Engels mentioned that he intended writing a pamphlet on List, and in another letter, on March 17, 1845, he greatly approved of Marx's own plans to publish in the journal Rheinische Jahrbücher zur gesellschaftlichen Reform, projected by Püttmann, a critical analysis of List's views. In his pamphlet Engels proposed to expand the critical remarks on List's practical suggestions (introduction of a protective system) which he had made in the second pf his "Speeches in Elberfeld" (see pp. 258-62 of this volume). However, Engels did not write that pamphlet. Neither did Marx's article on List appear in print. The extant drafts of the manuscript, abounding in abbreviations, erasures, corrections and insertions, are incomplete. The first sheet, apparently containing the author's title of the article and of the first chapter, is missing. Sheets 10-21 and 22 have also not been found. The extant part consists of large-size sheets numbered by Marx himself. Of these, numbers 2-5, containing four pages of text each, and sheet 6, containing text on the first three pages, belong to the first chapter. Following them is a small fragment on a separate unnumbered sheet. The second chapter, with the author's title, has reached us more complete and comprises sheets 7-9, containing four pages each. Of the third chapter only sheet 22 (two fragments filling two pages) and sheet 24 (four pages of text) are extant. The fourth chapter has the author's title and fills one unnumbered sheet (four pages). In his manuscript Marx analyses and quotes the first volume of List's book according to the 1841 edition — Friedrich List, Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie. Erster Band. Der internationale Handel, die Handelspolitik und der deutsche Zollverein, Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1841. At the beginning of 1845 Marx made numerous excerpts from this edition which he used in his work. He quotes French sources in his own German translation, with the exception of one excerpt, from a work by Louis Say, which he purposely quotes in French to show List's deliberately inaccurate way of quoting. The emphasis in the quotations belongs for the most part to Marx. In publishing the work in this edition, obvious slips of the pen in the manuscript have been corrected, editorial insertions have been made (in square brackets) where meaning might otherwise be obscure and some passages have been divided into paragraphs additional to those given by the author. Where the author's titles to chapters are missing, titles (in square brackets) have been supplied by the editors. The numbers of the sheets in the manuscript are given in Arab figures in square brackets. Words and phrases crossed out in the manuscript are not reproduced, although some of them have been taken into account in deciphering illegible passages. In the second chapter a number of paragraphs were crossed out by the author with a vertical line. Marx usually did that when he was using the crossed out passage in another place or in another variant of the work. Since the pages of the manuscript to which these passages could have been transferred are missing, the passages crossed out are reproduced in the context in question in angle brackets.
[97] The word "obstacle" is written in the manuscript over the word "inconvenience". And later in the text Marx repeatedly uses this method of proposing variants. In the translation such words are given in brackets after the word over which the variant is written.
[98] A Molossus in ancient prosody was a foot of three long syllables ( ). Marx uses the term ironically to describe List's heavy style.
[102] The Anti-Corn Law League—see Note 5. The movement for land reform, free allotment of plots to every worker and other democratic reforms arose in the 1840s in the United States of America and was headed by the National Reform Association.
[103] Ironical allusions to List's arguments and use of words. The words enclosed in inverted commas by Marx—"freie, mächtige und reiche Bürger" — allude to List's expression "das Aufkommen eines freien, industriellen und reichen Bürgertums" (the rise of a free, industrial and rich bourgeoisie) on page lxvi of his book. On page lxiv List claims credit for having shown the German gentry how profitable for them was the existence of an industrial bourgeoisie "zealously" working to increase the rents of their estates.
[104] "Confederation" is one of List's favourite words. He speaks of "the confederation of various activities", "the confederation of various knowledge", "the confederation of various forces" (see List, op. cit., p. 223).
[6] The struggle for legislation limiting the working day to ten hours started in England as early as the late 18th century and spread by the 1830s to the mass of the industrial workers. The representatives of the landed aristocracy saw their chance to use this popular slogan against the industrial bourgeoisie and supported the Ten Hour Bill in Parliament; the "Tory philanthropist" Lord Ashley headed the supporters of the Bill in Parliament from 1833. The Ten Hour Bill, applicable only to youths and women, was not passed until 1847.
[3] Here and elsewhere Engels quotes Reichardt's reviews of C. Briiggemann's book, Preussens Beruf in der deutschen Staats-Entwickelung, und die nächsten Bedingungen zu seiner Erfüllung, Berlin, 1843 and A. Benda's Katechismus für wahlberechtigte Bürger in Preussen, Berlin, 1843. Both reviews were published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VI, May 1844.