I am typing in here Allen Oakley's summary of Marx's recently discovered mss in which he presents a critique of List's 1841 book Das nationale System der politischen Okonomie, Erster Band.
What is most interesting is Marx's critique develops as one of the industrial system as a whole. Indeed Marx seems to have been moved to call for the destabilization of the industrial system tout court in the course of his List critique. It is a shame that it is not more widely available.
"To Marx, List espoused the cause of the German bourgeoisie and defended their activities as an essential function of German nationalism. In so doing, List failed to explicate the profoundly negative *human impact of the industrial system and avoided emphasising itse fundamental characteristic of serving the material and social self-interests of the bourgeois minority.
"For List industrial production in the factory system involved harnessing available 'productive forces' in the service of the *national* spirit. In Marx's reading of the argument, List personified the bourgeois concern to avoid the appearance of pursuing self interests...
"The bourgeois demand is that the state act in their interest by providing tariff protection from intl competition on the pretext of recognizing the state's more general right to interfere in economic operations. But inside this external barrier, the pursuit of individual wealth proceeds only with *nominal* concern for the nationalistic spirit. In spite of appearing to pursue a 'spiritual essence', Marx noted that the bourgeois capitalists take the oppty to fill their pockets with the 'worldly exchange values' they pretend to despise. In this context List paraded the factory system as the most effective form of organization for a spiritually sound and harmonious society.
"In his endeavor to foster this image of the 'spiritual harmony' of capitalism, List went on to argue that political economy should concern itself with the *means* for creating wealth (as a flow of exchange value) rather than with the wealth itself and its distribution. The individual returns that the bourgeoisie gain from onwerhsip of the means of production, and the associated ideas of exchange value and distribution, are not pertinent to an interpretation of a system of nationalistic political economy. National harmony and cooperation are to emphasized...
"On the behalf of the bourgeoisie, List saw his task as the creation of an idealised and socially sterilised version of the political economy of capitalism. His strategy was to try to discredit political economy for its theoretical reflections of the *realities* of the system while leaving the realities themselves untouched. In response to this, Marx defended someof the political economists, in particular Smith, Ricardo and Sismondi, for their exposure of the principal tenets of capitalism without prejudice...
"In Marx's view List's stress on the role of productive forces to the exclusion of recognising the pursuit of exchange value and profit was misleading. For while Marx was aware of the significance of 'productive forces' for comprehending the *material* dimension of this mode of production--its ability to produce in order to meet man's *material* needs--it was the *human* dimension of the system that he continued to emphasize. The objective of the capitalist is to produce, appropriate and realize *exchange value*, including profit. In this endeavor, 'productive forces and the production of exchange value are a unity and not legitimately treated as separable as argued by List...
"This characteristic mode of production has implications for the form of man's labour and a major effect on his conditions of life. In particular, labour itself exists as a commodity with exchange vlaue and which is bought and sold as just another input to production. The consequence of this is a neglect of man's human being and he is perceived only as a productive force. Marx stressed this point in a series of more or less rhetoric questions:
'Is it a high appreciation of man for him to figure as a 'force' alongside horses, steam and water?...Is the bourgeois, the factor owner, at all concerned for the worker developing his abilities, exercising his produtive capacities, fufilling himself as a human being, and thereby at the same time fufilling his human nature?'
"...[Marx then ]quoted two pertinent pieces from Ure...Ure's arguments were firstly that the capitalist's concern for labour centered upon replacing it with machines and/or reducing its cost. Secondly, he argued that because skilled labor is less able to be manipulated and is more self-willed it is desirable to develop unskilled labour only as 'a component of a mechanical system.' It was Marx's conclusion again that capitalism could not be *human* system: "The bourgeois see in the proletarian not a *human being*, but a force capable of creating wealth, a force which moreover he can then compare with other productive forces--an animal, a machine...The whole of human society becomes merely a machine for the creation of wealth'
"The situation of man under capitalism is a function of the particular 'social conditions' or 'political conditions' of the day. It was Marx's argument that these conditions are based upon the existence of private property. he granted that *industrial production* cuold be considered in abstraction from thes consitions, but as such it is not an historically or humanly complete conception:
'Industry can be regarded as a great workshop in which man first takes possession of his own forces and the forces of nature, objectifies himself and creates for himself the conditions of human existence. When industry is regarded in this way, one *abstracts* from the *circumstances* in which it operates today, and in which it exists as industry: one's standpoint is not from within the industrial epoch, but above it; industry is regarded not by what it is for man today, but by what present day man is for human history, what he is historically'...
"As Marx had previously argued, the transcedence of man's less than human condition under capitalism requires the abolition of private property and thus of the '*industrial' mode of production. Ony then can the 'productive forces' become *human* forces. Only then can proletarian labor become human labor. Such an abolition would be achieved by a proletarian revolution in which the proletariat realizes its role as the key to *human* history.
"'Today...[the proletariat]are still the slaves of the bourgeois, and in them he sees nothing but the instruments (the bearers) of his dirty (selfish) lust for profit; tomorrow they will break their chains and reveal themselves as the bearers of human development which will blow him sky high together with his industry, which assumes the dirty outer shell--which he regards as its essence--only until the human kernel has gained sufficient strength to burst this shell and appear in its own shape. Tomorrow they will burst the chains by which the bourgeois separates them from man and so distorts (transforms) them for a real social bond into fetters of society.
"Once again, then, Marx argued against the human consequences of the capitalist industrial system. In his polemic against List, he emphasised the potential for theoretical interpretation to distort and/or obscure the true nature of the system with respect to the situation that it dictated for workers and their families. List's bourgeois defense of the system was all the more crass because it went beyond the relatively open superficialities of orthodox political economy and distorted or obscured even the most obvious of capitalism's characterisitcs. Later of course this political economy itself would be subjected to a sustained and detailed critique by Marx on the basis that its presentation of the system also generated a false consciousness."
Allen Oakley, Marx's Critique of Political Economy: Intellectual Sources and Evolution, Vol 1. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984
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