Dear Jim,
A friend emailed Foster's Brenner critique before it appeared Foster's review appears in the April (I believe) issue of *Monthly Review* of which I don't have a copy. I only saw and bought the May 1999 issue, which has three interviews (Sweezy, Magdoff and Wood. Ed. Chris Phelps). I understand that David McNally responds to Foster. By the way McNally has an thoughtful critique of market socialism in the latest New Politics so I look forward to reading his reply to Foster.
Oh...you have alerted us many times to the importance of exports.How about this from Preobrazhensky:
"Increased opportunities to sell abroad must have the effect of promoting absorption of unrealized balances...The sale of even a part of these balances...has enormous significance for the entire system. That is true not because of the absolute weight of the foreign market, which is generally insignificant...but because sales in the foreign market will make it possible, at a given moment, to halt the contraction of the production apparatus of both departments a higher level than would be the case if this reserve of capitalist capacity was not brought into play. Contrary to Rosa Luxemburg's thinking, the external market is not important in and of itself, but only because it permits avoidance of far greater contraction of that market which capitalism acquires internally. This internal market is incomparably more significant for capitalism."
As Richard B Day puts it. "in the absence of foreign sales the typical capitalist crisis was accompanied by widespread destruction of existing fixed capital. Capitalism would destroy its own internal market, spontaneously created during the stage of economic expansion. With access to relatively minor foreign markets, on the other hand, unplanned overproduction could be disposed of, making it easier to ' rise to the next level of expanded reproduction and thereby to expand the basic market, which exists within capitalism itself.' In effect Preobrazhensky discovered what Keynesians would later refer to as the 'foreign trade multiplier,' or the notion that a small increase in exports might generate a multiple expansion of domestic sales or forestall a multiple contraction."
In the Decline of Capitalism (ME Sharpe, 1985). yours, rakesh
ps Michael, I am still don't have a clue as to reasons for the present m and a wave and how it compares and contrasts with past such waves. I don't know if Chandler has more recent analysis. I'll keep my eyes out for work by his disciples Thomas McGraw and Richard Langlois.